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CONFESSIONS 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER 

BEING AN EXTRACT 

FROM THE LIFE OF A SCHOLAR. 

FROM THE LAST LONDON EDITION. 

> 

BOSTON : 
WILLIAM D . TICKNOR. 

Corner of Washington and School Streets. 



M DCCC XLI. 

•On, I 



IP 



^V X 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



The American publisher having received orders for this 
work which he was unable to fulfil in this country or in 
England, has been induced to issue the present edition. 
To those who became acquainted with it twenty years 
since in the pages of the London Magazine, as well as to 
those whose knowledge of it is only traditional, he trusts 
its reappearance will not be unwelcome. As for the au- 
thorship and authenticity of these " Confessions," the for- 
mer has been attributed without denial to De Quincy, and 
the latter is believed to be unquestionable. 



Butts, Printer. 



TO THE READER. 



I here present you, courteous reader, with 
the record of a remarkable period of my life ; 
according to my application of it, I trust that it 
will prove, not merely an interesting record, but, 
in a considerable degree, useful and instructive. 
In that hope it is, that I have drawn it up : and 
that must be my apology for breaking through 
that delicate and honorable reserve, which, for 
the most part, restrains us from the public expos- 
ure of our own errors and infirmities. Nothing, 
indeed, is more revolting to English feelings, 
than the spectacle of a human being obtruding 
on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tear- 
ing away that " decent drapery," which time, 
or indulgence to human frailty, may have drawn 
over them : accordingly, the greater part of our 



TO THE READER. 



confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judi- 
cial confessions) proceed from demireps, adven- 
turers, or swindlers : and for any such acts of 
gratuitous self-humiliation from those who can 
be supposed in sympathy with the decent and 
self-respecting nart of society, we must look to 
French literature, or to that part of the German, 
which is tainted with the spurious and defective 
sensibility of the French. All this I feel so 
forcibly, and so nervously am I alive to reproach 
of this tendency, that I have for many months 
hesitated about the propriety of allowing this, or 
any part of my narrative, to come before the 
public eye, until after my death (when, for many 
reasons, the whole will be published) : and it is 
not without an anxious review of the reasons, 
for and against this step, that I have, at last, 
concluded on taking it. 

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, 
from public notice : they court privacy and sol- 
itude : and, even in their choice of a grave, will 
sometimes sequester themselves from the general 
population of the church-yard, as if declining to 
claim fellowship with the great family of man, 
and wishing (in the affecting language of Mr. 
Wordsworth) 



TO THE READER. 



Humbly to express 



A penitential loneliness. 

It is well, upon the whole, and for the interest 
of us all, that it should be so ; nor would I will- 
ingly, in my own person, manifest a disregard of 
such salutary feelings ; nor in act or word do any 
thing to weaken them. But, on the one hand, 
as my self-accusation does not amount to a con- 
fession of guilt, so, on the other, it is possible 
that, if it did, the benefit resulting to others, from 
the record of an experience purchased at so 
heavy a price, might compensate, by a vast 
overbalance, for any violence done to the feelings 
I have noticed, and justify a breach of the gen- 
eral rule. Infirmity and misery do not, of ne- 
cessity, imply guilt. They approach, or recede 
from, the shades of that dark alliance, in propor- 
tion to the probable motives and prospects of 
the offender, and the palliations, known or se- 
cret, of the offence ; in proportion as the temp- 
tations to it were potent from the first, and the 
resistance to it, in act or in effort, was earnest to 
the last. For my own part, without breach of 
truth or modesty, I may affirm, that my life has 
been, on the whole, the life of a philosopher: 
from my birth I was made an intellectual ere a- 



VI TO THE READER. 

ture ; and intellectual in the highest sense my 
pursuits and pleasures have been, even from my 
schoolboy days. If opium-eating be a sensual 
pleasure, and if I am bound to confess that I 
have indulged in it to an excess, not yet re- 
corded* of any other man, it is no less true, 
that 1 have struggled against this fascinating en- 
thralment with a religious zeal, and have at 
length, accomplished what I never yet heard at- 
tributed to any other man — have untwisted, 
almost to its final links, the accursed chain which 
fettered me. Such a self-conquest may reason- 
ably be set off in counterbalance to any kind or 
degree of self-indulgence. Not to insist, that in 
my case, the self-conquest was unquestionable, 
the self-indulgence open to doubts of casu- 
istry, according as that name shall be extended 
to acts aiming at the bare relief of pain, or shall 
be restricted to such as aim at the excitement of 
positive pleasure. 

Guilt, therefore, I do not acknowledge : and, 
if I did, it is possible that I might still resolve 

* ' Not yet recorded? I say : for there is one celebrated 
man of the present day, who, if all be true which is reported 
of him, has greatly exceeded me in quantity. 



TO THE READER. Vll 

on the present act of confession, in consideration 
of the service which I may thereby render to the 
whole class of opium-eaters. But who are 
they ? Reader, I am sorry to say, a very num- 
erous class indeed. Of this I became convinced 
some years ago, by computing at that time, the 
number of those in one small class of English 
society (the class of men distinguished for talent, 
or of eminent station) who were known to me, 
directly or indirectly, as opium-eaters ; such for 

instance, as the eloquent and benevolent , 

the late dean of ; Lord ; Mr. , 

the philosopher ; a late under-secretary of state 
(who described to me the sensation which first 
drove him to the use of opium, in the very same 

words as the dean of , viz., " that he felt 

as though rats were gnawing and abrading the 

coats of his stomach ;") Mr. ; and many 

others, hardly less known, whom it would be 
tedious to mention. Now, if one class, compar- 
atively so limited, could furnish so many scores 
of cases, (and that within the knowledge of one 
single inquirer,) it was a natural inference, that 
the entire population of England would furnish 
a proportionable number. The soundness of 



Vlll TO THE READER. 

this inference, however, I doubted, until some 
facts became known to me, which satisfied me, 
that it was not incorrect. I will mention two : 
1. Three respectable London druggists, in wide- 
ly remote quarters of London, from whom I 
happened lately to be purchasing small quanti- 
ties of opium, assured me, that the number of 
amateur opium-eaters (as I may term them) was, 
at this time, immense ; and that the difficulty of 
distinguishing these persons, to whom habit had 
rendered opium necessary, from such as were 
purchasing it with a view to suicide, occasioned 
them daily trouble and disputes. This evidence 
respected London only. But, 2. (which will 
possibly surprise the reader more,) some years 
ago, on passing through Manchester, I was in- 
formed by several cotton manufacturers, that 
their work people were rapidly getting into the 
practice of opium-eating ; so much so, that on 
a Saturday afternoon the counters of the drug- 
gists were strewed with pills of one, two, or 
three grains, in preparation for the known de- 
mand of the evening. The immediate occasion 
of this practice was the lowness of wages, which, 
at that time would not allow them to indulge in 



TO THE HEADER. IX 

ale or spirits : and wages rising, it may be 
thought that this practice would cease : but, as 
I do not readily believe that any man, having 
once tasted the divine luxuries of opium, will 
afterwards descend to the gross and mortal en- 
joyments of alcohol, I take it for granted, 

That those eat now, who never ate before , 
And those who always ate, now eat the more. 

Indeed, the fascinating powers of opium are 
admitted, even by medical writers, who are its 
greatest enemies : thus, for instance, Awsiter, 
apothecary to Greenwich hospital, in his " Es- 
say on the Effects of Opium," (published in 
the year 1763,) when attempting to explain why 
Mead had not been sufficiently explicit on the 
properties, counter-agents, &lc, of this drug, ex- 
presses himself in the following mysterious terms, 
((povovTca (SvvETOitii :) " perhaps he thought the 
subject of too delicate a nature to be made com- 
mon ; and as many people might then indiscrim- 
inately use it, it would take from that necessary 
fear and caution, which should prevent their ex- 
periencing the extensive power of this drug : 
for there are many properties in it, if univer- 
sally Jcnown, that would habituate the use, and 



TO THE READER. 



make it more in request with us than the Turks 
themselves ; the result of which knowledge," he 
adds, " must prove a general misfortune." In the 
necessity of this conclusion I do not altogether 
concur : but upon that point 1 shall have occa- 
sion to speak at the close of my confessions, 
where I shall present the reader with the moral 
of my narrative. 



PRELIMINARY CONFESSIONS 



These preliminary confessions, or introduc- 
tory narrative of the youthful adventures which 
laid the foundation of the writer's habit of opi- 
um eating in after life, it has been judged proper 
to premise, for three several reasons : 

1. As forestalling that question, and giving it 
a satisfactory answer, which else would painfully 
obtrude itself in the course of the Opium Con- 
fessions — " How came any reasonable being to 
subject himself to such a yoke of misery, volun- 
tarily to incur a captivity so servile, and know- 
ingly to fetter himself with such a seven-fold 
chain ? " a question which, if not somewhere 
plausibly resolved, could hardly fail, by the in- 
dignation which it would be apt to raise as 



12 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

against an act of wanton folly, to interfere with 
that degree of sympathy which is necessary in 
any case to an author's purposes. 

2. As furnishing a key to some parts of that 
tremendous scenery which afterwards peopled 
the dreams of the opium-eater. 

3. As creating some previous interest of a per- 
sonal sort in the confessing subject, apart from 
the matter of the confessions, which cannot fail 
to render the confessions themselves more inter- 
esting. If a man " whose talk is of oxen," 
should become an opium-eater, the probability 
is, that (if he is not too dull to dream at all) — 
he will dream about oxen : whereas, in the case 
before him. the reader will find that the opium- 
eater boasteth himself to be a philosopher ; and 
accordingly, that the phantasmagoria of his 
dreams (waking or sleeping, day dreams or night 
dreams) is suitable to one who in that character, 

Humani nihil a se alienum putat. 

For amongst the conditions which he deems 
indispensable to the sustaining of any claim to 
the title of philosopher, is not merely the pos- 
session of a superb intellect in its analytic func- 
tions (in which part of the pretension, however, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 13 

England can for some generations show but few 
claimants ; at least, he is not aware of any 
known candidate for this honor who can be 
styled emphatically a subtle thinlcer, with the 
exception of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and in a 
narrower department of thought, with the recent 
illustrious exception* of David Ricardo) — but 
also on such a constitution of the moral facul- 
ties, as shall give him an inner eye and power of 
intuition for the vision and mysteries of human 
nature : that constitution of faculties, in short, 
which (amongst all the generations of men that 
from the beginning of time have deployed into 

* A third exception might perhaps have been added : 
and my reason for not adding that exception is chiefly be- 
cause it was only in his juvenile efforts that the writer 
whom I allude to, expressly addressed himself to philo- 
sophical themes ; his riper powers have been dedicated (on 
very excusable and very intelligible grounds, under the 
present direction of the popular mind in England) to criti- 
cism and the fine arts. This reason apart, however, I doubt 
whether he is not rather to be considered an acute thinker 
than a subtle one. It is, besides, a great drawback on his 
mastery over philosophical subjects, that he has obviously 
not had the advantage of a regular scholastic education : 
he has not read Plato in his youth, (which most likely was 
only his misfortune,) but neither has he read Kant in his 
manhood, (which is his fault.) 



14 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

life, as it were, upon this planet) our English 
poets have possessed in the highest degree — 
and Scottish* professors in the lowest. 

I have often been asked, how I first came to 
be a regular opium-eater; and have suffered, 
very unjustly, in the opinion of my acquaintance, 
from being reputed to have brought upon myself 
all the sufferings which I shall have to record, 
by a long course of indulgence in this practice, 
purely for the sake of creating an artificial state 
of pleasurable excitement. This, however, is a 
misrepresentation of my case. True it is, that 
for nearly ten years I did occasionally take opi- 
um, for the sake of the exquisite pleasure it gave 
me ; but, so long as I took it with this view, I 
was effectually protected from all material bad 
consequences, by the necessity of interposing 
long intervals between the several acts of indul- 
gence, in order to renew the pleasurable sensa- 
tions. It was not for the purpose of creating 
pleasure, but of mitigating pain in the severest 
degree, that I first began to use opium as an ar- 
ticle of daily diet. In the twenty-eighth year 
of my age, a most painful affection of the stom- 

* I disclaim any allusion to existing professors, of whom 
indeed I know only one. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 15 

ach, which 1 had first experienced about ten 
years before, attacked me in great strength. 
This affection had originally been caused by the 
extremities of hunger, suffered in my boyish 
days. During the season of hope and redun- 
dant happiness which succeeded (that is, from 
eighteen to twenty-four) it had slumbered : for 
the three following years it had revived at inter- 
vals : and now, under unfavorable circumstan- 
ces, from depression of spirits, it attacked me 
with violence that yielded to no remedies but 
opium. As the youthful sufferings, which first 
produced this derangement of the stomach, 
were interesting in themselves and in the circum- 
stances that attended them, I shall here briefly 
retrace them. 

My father died, when I was about seven 
years old, and left me to the care of four guar- 
dians. I was sent to various schools, great and 
small ; and was very early distinguished for my 
classical attainments, especially for my knowl- 
edge of Greek. At thirteen I wrote Greek with 
ease ; and at fifteen my command of that lan- 
guage was so great, that I not only composed 
Greek verses in lyric metres, but would converse 
in Greek fluently, and without embarrassment — 



16 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

an accomplishment which I have not since met 
with in any scholar of my times, and which, in 
my case, was owing to the practice of daily 
reading off the newspapers into the best Greek 
I could furnish extempore ; for the necessity of 
ransacking my memory and invention, for all 
sorts and combinations of periphrastic expres- 
sions, as equivalents for modern ideas, images, 
relations of things, &c, gave me a compass of 
diction which would never have been called out 
by a dull translation of moral essays, <^c. "That 
boy," said one of my masters, pointing the at- 
tention of a stranger to me, " that boy could 
harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or 
I could address an English one." He who 
honored me with this eulogy, was a scholar, 
" and a ripe and good one : " and of all my 
tutors, was the only one whom I loved or reve- 
renced. Unfortunately for me, (and, as I after- 
wards learned, to this worthy man's great indig- 
nation,) I was transferred to the care, first of a 
blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic, lest I 
should expose his ignorance ; and finally, to that 
of a respectable scholar, at the head of a great 
school on an ancient foundation. This man had 
been appointed to his situation by College, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 17 

Oxford ; and was a sound, well built scholar, 
but (like most men, whom I have known from 
that college) coarse, clumsy, and inelegant. A 
miserable contrast he presented, in my eyes, to 
the Etonian brilliancy of my favorite master ; 
and besides, he could not disguise from my 
hourly notice, the poverty and meagreness of his 
understanding. It is a bad thing for a boy to 
be, and know himself, far beyond his tutors, 
whether in knowledge or in power of mind. 
This was the case, so far as regarded knowledge 
at least, not with myself only ; for the two boys, 
who jointly with myself composed the first form, 
were better Grecians than the head-master, 
though not more elegant scholars, nor at all 
more accustomed to sacrifice to the graces. 
When 1 first entered, I remember that we read 
Sophocles ; and it was a constant matter of tri- 
umph to us, the learned triumvirate of the first 
form, to see our " Archididascalus " (as he loved 
to be called) conning our lesson before we went 
up, and laying a regular train, with lexicon and 
grammar, for blowing up and blasting (as it 
were) any difficulties he found in the choruses ; 
whilst we never condescended to open our 
books, until the moment of going up, and were 
2 



18 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

generally employed in writing epigrams upon his 
wig, or some such important matter. My two 
class-fellows were poor, and dependent for their 
future prospects at the university, on the recom- 
mendation of the head-master ; but I, who had 
a small patrimonial property, the income of 
which was sufficient to support me at college, 
wished to be sent thither immediately. I made 
earnest representations on the subject to my 
guardians, but all to no purpose. One, who was 
more reasonable, and had more knowledge of the 
world than the rest, lived at a distance; two of 
the other three resigned all their authority into 
the hands of the fourth ; and this fourth with 
whom I had to negotiate, was a worthy man, in 
his way, but haughty, obstinate, and intolerant 
of all opposition to his will. After a certain 
number of letters and personal interviews, I 
found that I had nothing to hope for, not even a 
compromise of the matter, from my guardian : 
unconditional submission was what he demand- 
ed ; and I prepared myself, therefore, for other 
measures. Summer was now coming on with 
hasty steps, and my seventeenth birth-day was 
fast approaching ; after which day I had sworn 
within myself, that I would no longer be num- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 19 

r 

bered amongst school-boys. Money being what 
I chiefly wanted, I wrote to a woman of high 
rank, who, though young herself, had known me 
from a child, and had latterly treated me with 
great distinction, requesting that she would 
" lend " me five guineas. For upwards of a week 
no answer came ; and I was beginning to de- 
spond, when, at length, a servant put into my 
hands a double letter, with a coronet on the seal. 
The letter was kind and obliging ; the fair wri- 
ter was on the sea-coast, and in that way the 
delay had arisen ; she enclosed double of what 
1 had asked, and good-naturedly hinted, that if 
I should never repay her, it would not absolutely 
ruin her. Now then, I was prepared for my 
scheme : ten guineas, added to about two that I 
had remaining from my pocket money, seemed 
to me sufficient for an indefinite length of time ; 
and at that happy age, if no definite boundary 
can be assigned to one's power, the spirit of 
hope and pleasure makes it virtually infinite. 

It is a just remark of Dr. Johnson's (and 
what cannot often be said of his remarks, it is a 
very feeling one,) that we never do any thing 
consciously for the last time, (of things, that is, 
which we have long been in the habit of doing) 



20 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

without sadness of heart. This truth I felt 

deeply, when I came to leave , a place 

which I did not love, and where I had not been 

happy. On the evening before I left for 

ever, I grieved when the ancient and lofty 
school-room resounded with the evening service, 
performed for the last time in my hearing ; and 
at night, when the muster-roll of names was 
called over, and mine (as usual) was called first, 
I stepped forward, and, passing the head-master, 
who was standing by, I bowed to him, and look- 
ing earnestly in his face, thinking to myself, " He 
is old and infirm, and in this world I shall not 
see him again." I was right ; I never did see 
him again, nor never shall. He looked at me 
complacently, smiled good naturedly, returned 
my salutation, (or rather, my valediction,) and 
we parted (though he knew it not) for ever. [ 
could not reverence him intellectually ; but he 
had been uniformly kind to me, and had allowed 
me many indulgences ; and I grieved at the 
thought of the mortification I should inflict upon 
him. 

The morning came, which was to launch me 
into the world, and from which my whole suc- 
ceeding life has, in many important points, taken 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 21 

its coloring. I lodged in the head-master's 
house, and had been allowed, from my first en- 
trance, the indulgence of a private room, which 
I used both as a sleeping room and as a study. 
At half after three 1 rose, and gazed with deep 

emotion at the ancient towers of , " drest 

in earliest light," and beginning to crimson with 
the radiant lustre of a cloudless July morning. 
I was firm and immovable in my purpose : but 
yet agitated by anticipation of uncertain danger 
and troubles ; and if I could have foreseen the hur- 
ricane," and perfect hail -storm of affliction which 
soon fell upon me, well might I have been agi- 
tated. To this agitation the deep peace of the 
morning presented an. affecting contrast, and in 
some degree a medicine. The silence was more 
profound than that of midnight : and to me the 
silence of a summer morning is more touching 
than all other silence, because, the light being 
broad and strong, as that of noon-day at other 
seasons of the year, it seems to differ from per- 
fect day, chiefly because man is not yet abroad ; 
and thus, the peace of nature, and of the inno- 
cent creatures of God, seems to be secure and 
deep, only so long as the presence of man, and 
his restless and unquiet spirit, are not there to 



22 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

trouble its sanctity. I dressed myself, took my 
hat and gloves, and lingered a little in the room. 
For the last year and a half this room had been 
my " pensive citadel :" here I had read and 
studied through all the hours of night : and, 
though true it was, that for the latter part of this 
time I, who was framed for love and gentle 
affections, had lost my gaiety and happiness, 
during the strife and fever of contention with 
my guardian ; yet, on the other hand, as a boy, 
so passionately fond of books, and dedicated to 
intellectual pursuits, I could not fail to have en- 
joyed many happy hours in the midst of general 
dejection. I wept as I looked round on the 
chair, hearth, writing-table, and other familiar 
objects, knowing too certainly, that I looked 
upon them for the last time. Whilst I write 
this, it is eighteen years ago ; and yet, at this 
moment, I see distinctly as if it were but yes- 
terday, the lineaments and expresssions of the 
object on which I fixed my parting gaze : it was 

a picture of the lovely , which hung over 

the mantel-piece ; the eyes and mouth of which 
were so beautiful, and the whole countenance 
so radiant with benignity, and divine tranquillity, 
that 1 had a thousand times laid down my pen, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 23 

or my book, to gather consolation from it, as a 
devotee from his patron saint. Whilst I was 

yet gazing upon it, the deep tones of 

^»?clock proclaimed that it was four o'clock. I 
went up to the picture, kissed it, and then 
gently walked out, and closed the door forever ! 



So blended and intertwisted in this life are 
occasions of laughter and of tears, that I cannot 
yet recall, without smiling, an incident which oc- 
curred at that time, and which had nearly put a 
stop to the immediate execution of my plan. I 
had a trunk of immense weight ; for, besides my 
clothes, it contained nearly all my library. The 
difficulty was to get this removed to a carrier's : 
my room was at an aerial elevation in the house, 
and (what was worse) the staircase, which com- 
municated with this angle of the building, was 
accessible only by a gallery, which passed the 
head-master's chamber-door. I was a favorite 
with all the servants ; and, knowing that any of 
them would screen me, and act confidentially, I 
communicated my embarrassment to a groom of 
the head-master's. The groom swore he would 
do any thing I wished ; and, when the time 



24 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

arrived, went up stairs to bring the trunk down. 
This I feared was beyond the strength of any- 
one man : however, the groom was a man — 

Of Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 
The weight of mightiest monarchies ; 

and had a back as spacious as Salisbury Plains. 
Accordingly he persisted in bringing down the 
trunk alone, whilst 1 stood waiting at the foot of 
the last flight, in anxiety for the event. For 
some time I heard him descending with slow 
and firm steps : but, unfortunately, from his 
trepidation, as he drew near the dangerous 
quarter, within a few steps of the gallery, his 
foot slipped ; and the mighty burden falling from 
his shoulders, gained such increase of impetus 
at each step of the descent, that on reaching 
the bottom, it trundled, or rather leaped, right 
across, with the noise of twenty devils, against 
the very bed-room door of the archididascalus. 
My first thought was, that all was lost ; and that 
my only chance for executing a retreat was to 
sacrifice my baggage. However, on reflection, 
1 determined to abide the issue. The groom 
was in the utmost alarm, both on his own ac- 
count and on mine : but, in spite of this, so 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 25 

irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous, in this 
unhappy contreiems, taken possession of his 
fancy, that he sang out a long, loud and canorous 
peal of laughter, that might have wakened the 
Seven Sleepers. At the sound of this resonant 
merriment, within the very ears of insulted au- 
thority, I could not forbear joining in it ; sub- 
dued to this, not so much by the unhappy 
etourderie of the trunk, as by the effect it had 
upon the groom. We both expected, as a mat- 
ter of course, that Dr. would sally out of 

his room : for, in general, if but a mouse stirred, 
he sprang out like a mastiff from his kennel. 
Strange to say, however, on this occasion, when 
the noise of laughter had ceased, no sound, or 
rustling even, was to be heard in the bed-room. 
Dr. — had a painful complaint, which, some- 
times keeping him awake, made him sleep, per- 
haps, when it did come, the deeper. Gathering 
courage from the silence, the groom hoisted his 
burden again, and accomplished the remainder 
of his descent without accident. I waited until 
I saw the trunk placed on a wheelbarrow, and 
on its road to the carrier's : then " with Provi- 
dence my guide," I set off on foot, — carrying 
a small parcel, with some articles of dress under 



i 



26 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

my arm : a favorite English poet in one pocket ; 
and a small 12mo. volume, containing about nine 
plays of Euripides, in the other. 

It had been my intention originally to proceed 
to Westmoreland, both from the love I bore to 
that county, and on other personal accounts. 
Accident, however, gave a different direction to 
my wanderings, and I bent my steps towards 
North Wales. 

After wandering about for some time in Den- 
bighshire, Merionethshire, and Caernarvonshire, 

I took lodgings in a small neat house in B . 

Here I might have staid with great comfort for 
many weeks ; for provisions were cheap at 

B , from the scarcity of other markets for 

the surplus produce of a wide agricultural dis- 
trict. An accident, however, in which, perhaps, 
no offence was designed, drove me out to wan- 
der again. I know not whether my reader may 
have remarked, but I have often remarked, that 
the proudest class of people in England (or at 
any rate, the class whose pride is most apparent) 
are the families of bishops. Noblemen, and 
their children, carry about with them, in their 
very titles, a sufficient notification of their rank. 
Nay, their very names (and this applies also to 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



27 



the children of many untitled houses) are often, 
to the English ear, adequate exponents of high 
birth, or descent. Sackville, Manners, Fitzroy, 
Paulet, Cavendish, and scores of others, tell 
their own tale. Such persons, therefore, find 
every where a due sense of their claims already 
established, except among those who are igno- 
rant of the world, by virtue of their own obscu- 
rity ; " Not to know them argues one's self un- 
known." Their manners take a suitable tone 
and coloring ; and, for once that they find it ne- 
cessary to impress a sense of their consequence 
upon others, they meet with a thousand occa- 
sions for moderating and tempering this sense by 
acts of courteous condescension. With the fam- 
ilies of bishops it is otherwise ; with them it is 
all up-hill work, to make known their preten- 
sions ; for the proportion of the episcopal bench, 
taken from noble families, is not at any time very 
large ; and the succession to these dignities is so 
rapid, that the public ear seldom has time to be- 
come familiar with them, unless where they are 
connected with some literary reputation. Hence 
it is, that the children of bishops carry about 
with them an austere and repulsive air, indica- 
tive of claims not generally acknowledged, a 



28 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



sort of noli me tangere manner, nervously ap- 
prehensive of too familiar approach, and shrink- 
ing with the sensitiveness of a gouty man, from 
all contact with the 01 nolloi. Doubtless, a pow- 
erful understanding, or unusual goodness of na- 
ture, will preserve a man from such weakness; 
but, in general, the truth of my representation 
will be acknowledged ; pride, if not of deeper 
root in such families, appears, at least, more upon 
the surface of their manners. This spirit of man- 
ners naturally communicates itself to their do- 
mestics, and other dependants. Now, my land- 
lady had been a lady's maid, or a nurse, in the 

family of the Bishop of ; and had but 

lately married away and " settled " (as such 
people express it) for life. In a little town like 
B— — , merely to have lived in the bishop's fam- 
ily, conferred some distinction ; and my good 
landlady had rather more than her share of the 
pride I have noticed on that score. What " my 
lord " said, and what " my lord " did, how use- 
ful he was in parliament, and how indispensable 
at Oxford, formed the daily burden of her talk. 
All this I bore very well ; for I was too good- 
natured to laugh in any body's face, and I could 
make an ample allowance for the garrulity of an 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 29 

old servant. Of necessity, however, I must have 
appeared in her eyes very inadequately impressed 
with the bishop's importance ; and, perhaps, to 
punish me for my indifference, or possibly by ac- 
cident, she one day repeated to me a conversa- 
tion in which I was indirectly a party concerned. 
She had been to the palace to pay her respects 
to the family ; and, dinner being over, was sum- 
moned into the dining-room. In giving an ac- 
count of her household economy, she happened 
to mention that she had let her apartments. 
Thereupon the good bishop (it seemed) had ta- 
ken occasion to caution her as to her selection of 
inmates ; " for," said he, " you must recollect, 
Betty, that this place is in the high road to the 
Head ; so that multitudes of Irish swindlers, 
running away from their debts into England — 
and of English swindlers, running away from 
their debts to the Isle of Man, are likely to take 
this place in their route." This advice was cer- 
tainly not without reasonable grounds : but ra- 
ther fitted to be stored up for Mrs. Betty's pri- 
vate meditations, than specially reported to me. 
What followed, however, was somewhat worse : 
— " Oh, my lord," answered my landlady (ac- 
cording to her own representation of the matter) 



30 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

V I really don't think this young gentleman is a 

swindler ; because ;" " You don't think 

me a swindler?" said I, interrupting her, in a 
tumult of indignation ; " for the future, I shall 
spare you the trouble of thinking about it." 
And without delay I prepared for my departure. 
Some concessions the good woman seemed dis- 
posed to make ; but a harsh and contemptuous 
expression, which I fear that I applied to the 
learned dignitary himself, roused her indignation 
in turn : and reconciliation then became impossi- 
ble. 1 was, indeed, greatly irritated at the bish- 
op's having suggested any grounds of suspicion, 
however remotely, against a person whom he 
had never seen ; and I thought of letting him 
know my mind in Greek ; which, at the same 
time that it would furnish some presumption that 
I was no swindler, would also (I hoped) compel 
the bishop to reply in the same language ; in 
which case, I doubted not to make it appear, 
that if I was not so rich as his lordship, I was a 
far better Grecian. Calmer thoughts, however, 
drove this boyish design out of my mind ; for I 
considered, that the bishop was in the right to 
counsel an old servant ; that he could not have 
designed that his advice should be reported to 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



31 



me ; and that the same coarseness of mind, 
which had led Mrs. Betty to repeat the advice 
at all, might have colored it in a way more agree- 
able to her own style of thinking, than to the 
actual expressions of the worthy bishop. 

I left the lodging the very same hour ; and 
this turned out a very unfortunate occurrence for 
me ; because, living henceforward at inns, 1 was 
drained of my money very rapidly. In a fort- 
night I was reduced to short allowance ; that is, 
I could allow myself only one meal a day. 
From the keen appetite produced by constant 
exercise, and mountain air, acting on a youthful 
stomach, 1 soon began to suffer greatly on this 
slender regimen ; for the single meal, which I 
could venture to order, was coffee or tea. Even 
this, however, was at length withdrawn ; and af- 
terwards, so long as I remained in Wales, I sub- 
sisted either on blackberries, hips, haws, &c, or 
on the casual hospitalities which I now and then 
received, in return for such little services as I 
had an opportunity of rendering. Sometimes I 
wrote letters of business for cottagers, who hap- 
pened to have relatives in Liverpool, or in Lon- 
don ; more often I wrote love-letters to their sweet- 
hearts for young women who had lived as servants 



32 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



in Shrewsbury, or other towns on the English 
border. On all such occasions I gave great sat- 
isfaction to my humble friends, and was generally 
treated with hospitality ; and once, in particular, 
near the village of Llan-y-styndwr, (or some 
such name,) in a sequestered part of Merioneth- 
shire, I was entertained for upwards of three 
days by a family of young people, with an affec- 
tionate and fraternal kindness that left an im- 
pression upon my heart not yet impaired. The 
family consisted, at that time, of four sisters, and 
three brothers, all grown up, and remarkable for 
elegance and delicacy of manners. So much 
beauty, and so much native good breeding and 
refinement, I do not remember to have seen be- 
fore or since in any cottage, except once or twice 
in Westmoreland and Devonshire. They spoke 
English ; an accomplishment not often met with 
in so many members of one family, especially in 
villages remote from the high road. Here I 
wrote, on my first introduction, a letter about 
prize money, for one of the brothers, who had 
served on board an English man of war ; and 
more privately, two love-letters for two of the 
sisters. They were both interesting looking 
girls, and one of uncommon loveliness. In the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 33 

midst of their confusion and blushes, whilst dic- 
tating, or rather giving me general instructions, it 
did not require any great penetration to discover 
that what they wished was, that their letters 
should be as kind as was consistent with proper 
maidenly pride. 1 contrived so to temper my 
expressions, as to reconcile the gratification of 
both feelings ; and they were much pleased with 
the way in which I had expressed their thoughts, 
as (in their simplicity) they were astonished at 
my having so readily discovered them. The 
reception one meets with from the women of a 
family, generally determines the tenor of one's 
whole entertainment. In this case I had dis- 
charged my confidential duties as secretary, so 
much to the general satisfaction, perhaps also 
amusing them with my conversation, that I was 
pressed to stay with a cordiality which I had lit- 
tle inclination to resist. I slept with the broth- 
ers, the only unoccupied bed standing in the 
apartment of the young women : but in all other 
points, they treated me with a respect not usu- 
ally paid to purses as light as mine ; as if my 
scholarship were sufficient evidence, that I was 
of " gentle blood." Thus I lived with them for 
three days, and great part of a fourth ; and, 
3 



34 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

from the undiminished kindness which they con- 
tinued to show me, I believe I might have staid 
with them up to this time, if their power had 
corresponded with their wishes. On the last 
morning, however, I perceived upon their coun- 
tenances, as they sate at breakfast, the expres- 
sion of some unpleasant communication which 
was at hand ; and soon after one of the brothers 
explained to me, that their parents had gone, the 
day before my arrival, to an annual meeting of 
Methodists, held at Caernarvon, and were that 
day expected to return ; " and if they should 
not be so civil as they ought to be,'' he begged. 
on the part of all the young people, that I would 
not take it amiss. The parents returned with 
churlish faces, and " Dym Sassenach " (no 
English) in answer to all my addresses. I saw 
how matters stood ; and so, taking an affection- 
ate leave of my kind, and interesting young hosts, 
I went my way. For, though they spoke warmly 
to their parents in my behalf, and often excused 
the manner of the old people, by saying, that it 
was "only their way," yet I easily understood that 
my talent for writing love-letters would do as lit- 
tle to recommend me with two grave sexagena- 
rian Welsh Methodists, as my Greek Sapphics 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 35 

or Alcaics ; and what had been hospitality, 
when offered to me with the gracious courtesy 
of my young friends, would become charity, 
when connected with the harsh demeanor of 
these old people. Certainly, Mr. Shelley is right 
in his notions about old age ; unless powerfully 
counteracted by all sorts of opposite agencies, it 
is a miserable corrupter and blighter to the ge- 
nial charities of the human heart. 

Soon after this, I contrived, by means which 
I must omit for want of room, to transfer myself 
to London. And now began the latter and 
fiercer stage of my long sufferings ; without using 
a disproportionate expression I might say, of my 
agony. For I now suffered, for upwards of six- 
teen weeks, the physical anguish of hunger in 
various degrees of intensity ; but as bitter, per- 
haps, as ever any human being can have suffered 
who has survived it. I would not needlessly 
harass my reader's feelings, by a detail of all 
that I endured ; for extremities such as these, 
under any circumstances of heaviest misconduct 
or guilt, cannot be contemplated, even in de- 
scription, without a rueful pity that is painful to 
the natural goodness of the human heart. Let 
it suffice, at least on this occasion, to say, that a 



36 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

few fragments of bread from the breakfast-table 
of one individual (who supposed me to be ill. 
but did not know of my being in utter want,) 
and these at uncertain intervals, constituted my 
whole support. During the former part of my 
sufferings (that is, generally in Wales, and al- 
ways for the first two months in London) I was 
houseless, and very seldom slept under a roof. 
To this constant exposure to the open air I as- 
cribe it mainly, that I did not sink under my 
torments. Latterly, however, when cold and 
more inclement weather came on, and when, 
from the length of my sufferings, I had begun to 
sink into a more languishing condition, it was, no 
doubt, fortunate for me, that the same person to 
whose breakfast-table I had access, allowed me 
to sleep in a large unoccupied house, of which 
he was tenant. Unoccupied, I call it, for there 
was no household or establishment in it ; nor any 
furniture, indeed, except a table and a few 
chairs. But I found, on taking possession of my 
new quarters, that the house already contained 
one single inmate, a poor, friendless child, appar- 
ently ten years old ; but she seemed hunger-bit- 
ten ; and sufferings of that sort often make chil- 
dren look older than they are. From this for- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 37 

lom child I learned, that she had slept and lived 
there alone, for some time before I came ; and 
great joy the poor creature expressed, when she 
found that 1 was, in future, to be her companion 
through the hours of darkness. The house was 
large ; and, from the want of furniture, the noise 
of the rats made a prodigious echoing on the 
spacious staircase and hall ; and, amidst the real 
fleshly ills of cold, and, I fear, hunger, the forsa- 
ken child had found leisure to suffer still more (it 
appeared) from the self-created one of ghosts. 
1 promised her protection against all ghosts what- 
soever ; but, alas ! I could offer her no other 
assistance. We lay upon the floor, with a bun- 
dle of cursed law papers for a pillow ; but with 
no other covering than a sort of large horseman's 
cloak ; afterwards, however, we discovered, in a 
garret, an old sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, 
and some fragments of other articles, which 
added a little to our warmth. The poor child 
crept close to me for warmth, and for security 
against her ghostly enemies. When I was not 
more than usually ill, I took her into my arms, 
so that, in general, she was tolerably warm, and 
often slept when I could not ; for, during the 
last two months of my sufferings, I slept much 



38 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

in the day time, and was apt to fall into tran- 
sient dozings at all hours. But my sleep dis- 
tressed me more than my watching ; for, besides 
the tumultuousness of my dreams (which were 
only not so awful as those which 1 shall have to 
describe hereafter as produced by opium,) my 
sleep was never more than what is called dog- 
sleep ; so that I could hear myself moaning, and 
was often, as it seemed to me, awakened sud- 
denly by my own voice : and, about this time a 
hideous sensation began to haunt me as soon as 
I fell into a slumber, which has since returned 
upon me, at different periods of my life, viz. a 
sort of twitching (I know not where, but appar- 
ently about the region of the stomach.) which 
compelled me violently to throw out my feet for 
the sake of relieving it. This sensation coming 
on as soon as I began to sleep, and the effort to 
relieve it constantly awaking me, at length I 
slept only from exhaustion ; and from increasing 
weakness (as I said before) I was constantly 
falling asleep, and constantly awaking. Mean- 
time, the master of the house sometimes came in 
upon us suddenly, and very early, sometimes not 
till ten o'clock, sometimes not at all. He was 
in constant fear of bailiffs ; improving on the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 39 

plan of Cromwell, every night he slept in a dif- 
ferent quarter of London ; and I observed that 
he never failed to examine, through a private 
window, the appearance of those who knocked 
at the door, before he would allow it to be 
opened. He breakfasted alone ; indeed, his 
tea-equipage would hardly have admitted of his 
hazarding an invitation to a second person — 
any more than the quantity of esculent materiel 
which, for the most part, was little more than a 
roll, or a few biscuits, which he had bought on 
his road from the place where he had slept. Or, 
if he had asked a party, as I once learnedly and 
facetiously observed to him — the several mem- 
bers of it must have stood in the relation to each 
other (not sate in any relation whatever) of suc- 
cession, as the metaphysicians have it, and not 
of co-existence ; in the relation of the parts of 
time, and not of the parts of space. During his 
breakfast, I generally contrived a reason for 
lounging in ; and, with an air of as much indif- 
ference as I could assume, took up such frag- 
ments as he had left — sometimes, indeed, there 
were none at all. In doing this, I committed 
no robbery except upon the man himself, who 
was thus obliged, (I believe,) now and then to 



40 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

send out at noon for an extra biscuit ; for, as to 
the poor child, she was never admitted into his 
study (if I may give that name to his chief de- 
pository of parchments, law writings, he. ;) that 
room was to her the Blue-beard room of the 
house, being regularly locked on his departure to 
dinner, about six o'clock, which usually was his 
final departure for the night. Whether this 

child were an illegitimate daughter of Mr. , 

or only a servant, I could not ascertain ; she 
did not herself know ; but certainly she was 
treated altogether as a menial servant. No 

sooner did Mr. make his appearance than 

she went below stairs, brushed his shoes, coat, 
&c. ; and, except when she was summoned to 
run an errand, she never emerged from the dis- 
mal Tartarus of the kitchens, to the upper air, 
until my welcome knock at night called up her 
little trembling footsteps to the front door. Of 
her life during the day-time, however, I knew 
but little but what I gathered from her own ac- 
count at night ; for, as soon as the hours of 
business commenced, I saw that my absence 
would be acceptable ; and, in general, therefore, 
I went off and sate in the parks, or elsewhere, 
until night-fall. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 41 

But who, and what, meantime, was the mas- 
ter of the house himself ? Reader, he was one 
of those anomalous practitioners in lower de- 
partments of the law, who — what shall 1 say ? 
— who on prudential reasons, or from necessity, 
deny themselves all indulgence in the luxury of 
too delicate a conscience ; (a periphrasis which 
might be abridged considerably, but that I leave 
to the reader's taste ;) in many walks of life, a 
conscience is a more expensive incumbrance, 
than a wife or a carriage ; and just as people 
talk of " laying down " their carriages, so I 

suppose my friend, Mr. , had " laid down " 

his conscience for a time ; meaning, doubtless, 
to resume it as soon as he could afford it. The 
inner economy of such a man's daily life would 
present a most strange picture, if 1 could allow 
myself to amuse the reader at his expense. 
Even with my limited opportunities for observing 
what went on, I saw many scenes of London 
intrigues, and complex chicanery, "cycle and 
epicycle, orb in orb," at which I sometimes 
smile to this day — and at which I smiled then, 
in spite of my misery. My situation, however, 
at that time, gave me little experience, in my 
own person, of any qualities in Mr. 's char- 



42 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

actcr but such as did him honor ; and of his 
whole strange composition, I must forget every 
thing but that towards me he was obliging, and, 
to the extent of his power, generous. 

That power was not, indeed, very extensive ; 
however, in common with the rats, I sate rent 
free ; and, as Dr. Johnson has recorded, that he 
never but once in his life had as much wall-fruit 
as he could eat, so let me be grateful, that on 
that single occasion I had as large a choice of 
apartments in a London mansion as I could 
possibly desire. Except the Blue-beard room, 
which the poor child believed to be haunted, all 
others, from the attics to the cellars, were at our 
service ; " the world was all before us ;" and 
we pitched our tent for the night in any spot 
we chose. This house I have already described 
as a large one ; it stands in a conspicuous situa- 
tion, and in a well-known part of London. Many 
of my readers will have passed it, I doubt not, 
within a few hours of reading this. For myself, 
I never fail to visit it when business draws me 
to London ; about ten o'clock this very night, 
August 15, 1821, being my birth-day — 1 turned 
aside from my evening walk, down Oxford Street, 
purposely to take a glance at it : it is now oc- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 43 

cupied by a respectable family ; and, by the 
lights in the front drawing-room, I observed a 
domestic party, assembled perhaps at tea, and 
apparently cheerful and gay. Marvellous con- 
trast in my eyes to the darkness — cold — silence 
— and desolation of that same house eighteen 
years ago, when its nightly occupants were one 
famishing scholar, and a neglected child. — Her, 
by-the-by, in after years, I vainly endeavored to 
trace. Apart from her situation, she was not 
what would be called an interesting child : she 
was neither pretty, nor quick in understanding, 
nor remarkably pleasing in manners. But, 
thank God ! even in those years I needed not 
the embellishments of novel-accessaries to con- 
ciliate my affections ; plain human nature, in its 
humblest and most homely apparel, was enough 
for me : and I loved the child because she was 
my partner in wretchedness. If she is now 
living, she is probably a mother, with children 
of her own ; but, as I have said, I could never 
trace her. 

This I regret : but another person there was 
at that time, whom I have since sought to trace 
with far deeper earnestness, and with far deeper 
sorrow at my failure. This person was a young 



44 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

woman, and one of that unhappy class who 
subsist upon the wages of prostitution. I feel 
no shame, nor have any reason to feel it, in 
avowing, that I was then on familiar and friend- 
ly terms with many women in that unfortunate 
condition. The reader needs neither smile at 
this avowal, nor frown. For, not to remind my 
classical readers of the old Latin proverb — 
" Sine Cerere" &c, it may well be supposed 
that in the existing state of my purse, my con- 
nexion with such women could not have been 
an impure one. But the truth is, that at no 
time of my life have I been a person to hold 
myself polluted by the touch or approach of any 
creature that wore a human shape : on the con- 
trary, from my very earliest youth it has been 
my pride to converse familiarly, more Socratico, 
with all human beings, man, woman, and child, 
that chance might fling in my way : a practice 
which is friendly to the knowledge of human 
nature, to good feelings, and to that frankness 
of address which becomes a man who would be 
thought a philosopher. For a philosopher should 
not see with the eyes of the poor limitary crea- 
ture calling himself a man of the world, and 
filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 45 

of birth and education, but should look upon 
himself as a Catholic creature, and as standing 
in an equal relation to high and low — to edu- 
cated and uneducated, to the guilty and the in- 
nocent. Being myself at that time of necessity 
a peripatetic, or a walker of the streets, I natu- 
rally fell in more frequently with those female 
peripatetics, who are technically called Street- 
walkers, Many of these women had occasionally 
taken my part against watchmen who wished to 
drive me off the steps of houses where I was sit- 
ting. But one amongst them, the one on whose 
account 1 have at all introduced this subject — 
yet no ! let me not class thee, oh noble minded 

Ann , with that order of women ; let me 

find, if it be possible, some gentler name to de- 
signate the condition of her to whose bounty and 
compassion, ministering to my necessities when 
all the world had forsaken me, I owe it that I am 
at this time alive. — For many weeks I had 
walked at nights with this poor, friendless girl 
up and down Oxford Street, or had rested with 
her on steps and under the shelter of porticos. 
She could not be so old as myself: she told me, 
indeed, that she had not completed her sixteenth 
year. By such questions as my interest about 



46 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

her prompted, I had gradually drawn forth her 
simple history. Her's was a case of ordinary 
occurrence (as I have since had reason to think) 
and one in which, if London beneficence had 
better adapted its arrangements to meet it, the 
power of the law might oftener be interposed to 
protect, and to avenge. But the stream of 
London charity flows in a channel which, though 
deep and mighty, is yet noiseless and under 
ground ; not obvious or readily accessible to 
poor, houseless wanderers : and it cannot be de- 
nied that the outside air and frame-work of Lon- 
don society is harsh, cruel, and repulsive. In 
any case, however, I saw that part of her in- 
juries might easily have been redressed : and I 
urged her often and earnestly to lay her com- 
plaint before a magistrate : friendless as she was, 
I assured her that she would meet with imme- 
diate attention ; and that English justice, which 
was no respecter of persons, would speedily and 
amply avenge her on the brutal ruffian who had 
plundered her little property. She promised me 
often that she would ; but she delayed taking 
the steps I pointed out, from time to time : for 
she was timid and dejected to a degree which 
showed how deeply sorrow had taken hold of 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 47 

her young heart : and perhaps she thought justly 
that the most upright judge, and the most right- 
eous tribunals, could do nothing to repair her 
heaviest wrongs. Something, however, would 
perhaps have been done : for it had been set- 
tled between us at length, but unhappily on 
the very last time but one that I was ever to see 
her, that in a day or two we should speak on 
her behalf. This little service it was destined, 
however, that I should never realize. Mean- 
time, that which she rendered to me, and which 
was greater than I could ever have repaid her, 
was this : — One night, when we were pacing 
slowly along Oxford Street, and after a day 
when I had felt unusually ill and faint, I request- 
ed her to turn off with me into Soho square : 
thither we went ; and we sate down on the steps 
of a house, which, to this hour, I never pass 
without a pang of grief, and an inner act of 
homage to the spirit of that unhappy girl, in 
memory of the noble act which she there per- 
formed. Suddenly, as we sate, I grew much 
worse : 1 had been leaning my head against her 
bosom ; and all at once I sank from her arms 
and fell backwards on the steps. From the sen- 
sations I then had, I felt an inner conviction of 



48 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



the liveliest kind that, without some powerful 
and reviving stimulus, I should either have died 
on the spot — or should at least have sunk to a 
point of exhaustion from which all reascent, un- 
der my friendless circumstances, would soon have 
become hopeless. Then it was, at this crisis of 
my fate, that my poor orphan companion — who 
had herself met with little but injuries in this 
world — stretched out a saving hand to me. 
Uttering a cry of terror, but without a moment's 
delay, she ran off into Ox ford ^Street, and in 
less time than could be imagined, returned 
to me with a glass of port wine and spices, that 
acted upon my empty stomach (which at that 
time would have rejected all solid food) with 
an instantaneous power of restoration : and for 
this glass the generous girl without a murmur 
paid out of her own humble purse, at a time — 
be it remembered ! when she had scarcely where- 
withal to purchase the bare necessaries of 
life, and when she could have no reason to ex- 
pect that I should ever be able to reimburse her. 
Oh ! youthful benefactress ! how often in suc- 
ceeding years, standing in solitary places, and 
thinking of thee with grief of heart and perfect 
love, how often have I wished that, as in ancient 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 49 

times the curse of a father was believed to have 
a supernatural power, and to pursue its object 
with a fatal necessity of self-fulfilment, — even 
so the benediction of a heart oppressed with 
gratitude, might have a like prerogative ; might 
have power given to it from above to chase — 
to haunt — to way-lay — to overtake — to pur- 
sue thee into the central darkness of a London 
brothel, or (if it were possible) into the darkness 
of the grave — there to awaken thee with an 
authentic message of peace and forgiveness, and 
of final reconciliation ! 

I do not often weep : for not only do my 
thoughts on subjects connected with the chief 
interests of man daily, nay hourly, descend a 
thousand fathoms " too deep for tears ;" not 
only does the sternness of my habits of thought 
present an antagonism to the feelings which 
prompt tears — wanting of necessity to those 
who, being protected usually by their levity from 
any tendency to meditative sorrow, would by 
that same levity be made incapable of resisting 
it on any casual access of such feelings : — but 
also, I believe that all minds which have con- 
templated such objects as deeply as I have done, 
must, for their own protection from utter despond- 
4 



50 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

ency, have early encouraged and cherished some 
tranquillizing belief as to the future balances and 
the hieroglyphic meanings of human sufferings. 
On these accounts, I am cheerful to this hour : 
and, as I have said, I do not often weep. Yet 
some feelings, though not deeper or more pas- 
sionate, are more tender than others : and often, 
when I walk at this time in Oxford Street, by 
dreamy lamp-light, and hear those airs played on 
a barrel-organ which years ago solaced me and 
my dear companion, (as I must always call her,) 
I shed tears, and muse with myself at the mys- 
terious dispensation which so suddenly and so 
critically separated us for ever. How it hap- 
pened, the reader will understand from what re- 
mains of this introductory narration. 

Soon after the period of the last incident I 
have recorded, I met, in Albemarle Street, a 
gentleman of his late Majesty's household. This 
gentle i had received hospitalities, on different 
occasions, from my family : and he challenged 
me upon the strength of my family likeness. I 
did not attempt any disguise : I answered his 
questions ingenuously, — and, on his pledging 
his word cf honor that he would not betray me 
to my guardians, I gave him an address to my 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 51 

friend the attorney's. The next day 1 received 
from him a £10 bank note. The letter en- 
closing it was delivered with other letters of 
business to the attorney : but, though his look 
and manner informed me that he suspected its 
contents, he gave it up to me honorably and 
without demur. 

This present, from the particular service to 
which it was applied, leads me naturally to speak 
of the purpose which had allured me up to Lon- 
don, and which I had been (to use a forensic 
word) soliciting from the first day of my arrival 
in London, to that of my final departure. 

In so mighty a world as London, it will sur- 
prise my readers that I should not have found 
some means of staving off the last extremities of 
penury ; and it will strike them that two re- 
sources at least must have been open to me, viz. 
either to seek assistance from the friends of my 
family, or to turn my youthful talents and attain- 
ments into some channel of pecuniary emolu- 
ment. As to the first course, I may observe, 
generally, that what I dreaded beyond all other 
evils was the chance of being reclaimed by my 
guardians ; not doubting that whatever power 
the law gave them would have been enforced 



52 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

against me to the utmost ; that is, to the ex- 
tremity of forcibly restoring me to the school 
which I had quitted ; a restoration which as it 
would in my eyes have been a dishonor, even if 
submitted to voluntarily, could not fail, when 
extorted from me in contempt and defiance of 
my own wishes and efforts, to have been a hu- 
miliation worse to me than death, and which 
would indeed have terminated in death. I was, 
therefore, shy enough of applying for assistance 
even in those quarters where I was sure of re- 
ceiving it - — at the risk of furnishing my guard- 
ians with any clue for recovering me. But, as 
to London in particular, though doubtless, my 
father had in his life-time had many friends there, 
yet (as ten years had passed since his death) I 
remembered few of them even by name : and 
never having seen London before, except once 
for a few hours, I knew not the address of even 
those few. To this mode of gaining help, there- 
fore, in part the difficulty, but much more the 
paramount fear which I have mentioned, habit- 
ually indisposed me. In regard to the other 
mode, I now feel half inclined to join my reader 
in wondering that I should have overlooked it. 
Asa corrector of Greek proofs (if in no other 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 53 

way,) I might doubtless have gained enough for 
my slender wants. Such an office as this I 
could have discharged with an exemplary and 
punctual accuracy that would soon have gained 
me the confidence of my employers. But it 
must not be forgotten that, even for such an 
office as this, it was necessary that I should first 
of all have an introduction to some respectable 
publisher : and this I had no means of obtaining. 
To say the truth, however, it had never once 
occurred to me to think of literary labors as a 
source of profit. No mode sufficiently speedy 
of obtaining money had ever occurred to me, 
but that of borrowing it on the strength of my 
future claims and expectations. This mode I 
sought by every avenue to compass : and 
amongst other persons 1 applied to a Jew named 
D * 



* To this same Jew, by the way, some eighteen months 
afterwards, I applied again on the same business ; and, 
dating at that time from a respectable college, I was fortu- 
nate enough to gain his serious attention to my proposals. 
My necessities had not arison from any extravagance, or 
youthful levities, (these my habits and the nature of my 
pleasures raised me far above,) but simply from the vindic- 
tive malice of my guardian, who, when he found himself 
no longer able to prevent me from going to the university, 



54 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



To this Jew, and to other advertising money- 
lenders, (some of whom were, I believe, also 
Jews,) I had introduced myself with an account 
of my expectations ; which account, on exam- 
ining my father's will at Doctor's Commons, 
they had ascertained to be correct. The person 
there mentioned as the second son of , was 

had, as a parting token of his good nature, refused to sign 
an order for granting me a shilling beyond the allowance 
made to me at school — viz. one hundred pounds per an- 
num. Upon this sum it was, in my time, barely possible 
to have lived in college ; and not possible to a man who, 
though above the paltry affectation of ostentatious disregard 
for money, and without any expensive tastes, confided nev- 
ertheless rather too much in servants, and did not delight 
in the petty details of minute economy. I soon, therefore, 
became embarrassed ; and at length, after a most volumin- 
ous negotiation with the Jew, (some parts of which, if I 
had leisure to rehearse them, would greatly amuse my 
readers,) I was put in possession of the sum I asked for — 
on the " regular " terms of paying the Jew seventeen and 
a half per cent, by way of annuity on all the money fur- 
nished ; Israel, on his part, graciously resuming no more 
than about ninety guineas of the said money, on account 
of an attorney's bill, (for what services, to whom rendered, 
and when, whether at the siege of Jerusalem — at the 
building of the Second Temple — or on some earlier occa- 
sion, I have not yet been able to discover). How many 
perches this bill measured I really forget: but I still keep 
it in a cabinet of natural curiosities ; and some time or 
other I believe I shall present it to the British Museum. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 55 

found to have all the claims (or more than all) 
that I had stated : but one question still remain- 
ed, which the faces of the Jews pretty signifi- 
cantly suggested, — was I that person ? This 
doubt had never occurred to me as a possible 
one ; I had rather feared, whenever my Jewish 
friends scrutinized me keenly, that I might be 
too well known to be that person — and that 
some scheme might be passing in their minds for 
entrapping me and selling me to my guardians. 
It was strange to me to find my own self mate- 
rialiter considered (so I expressed it, for I doat- 
ed on logical accuracy of distinctions,) accused, 
or at least suspected, of counterfeiting my own 
self, formaliter considered. However, to satisfy 
their scruples, I took the only course in my 
power. Whilst I was in Wales, I had received 
various letters from young friends : these I pro- 
duced : for I carried them constantly in my 
pocket — being, indeed, by this time, almost 
the only relics of my personal incumbrances 
(excepting the clothes I wore) which I had not 
in one way or other disposed of. Most of these 

letters were from the Earl of , who was at 

that time my chief (or rather only) confidential 
friend. These letters were dated from Eton. I 



56 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

had also some from the Marquis of , his 

father, who though absorbed in agricultural pur- 
suits, yet having been an Etonian himself, and 
as good a scholar as a nobleman needs to be — 
still retained an affection for classical studies, 
and for youthful scholars. He had, accordingly, 
from the time that 1 was fifteen, corresponded 
with me ; sometimes upon the great improve- 
ments which he had made, or was meditating, 

in the counties of M and SI since I 

had been there ; sometimes upon the merits of 
a Latin poet ; at other times, suggesting sub- 
jects to me on which he wished me to write 
verses. 

On reading the letters, one of my Jewish 
friends agreed to furnish two or three hundred 
pounds on my personal security — provided I 
could persuade the young Earl, who was, by 
the way, not older than myself, to guarantee the 
payment on our coming of age : the Jew's final 
object being, as I now suppose, not the trifling 
profit he could expect to make by me, but the 
prospect of establishing a connexion with my 
noble friend, whose immense expectations were 
well known to him. In pursuance of this pro- 
posal on the part of the Jew, about eight or 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 57 

nine days after I had received the £10, I pre- 
pared to go down to Eton. Nearly £3 of the 
money I had given to my money-lending friend, 
on his alleging that the stamps must be bought, 
in order that the writings might be preparing 
whilst I was away from London. I thought in 
my heart that he was lying ; but I did not wish 
to give him any excuse for charging his own 
delays upon me. A smaller sum I had given 
to my friend the attorney (who was connected 
with the money-lenders as their lawyer,) to 
which, indeed, he was entitled for his unfurnish- 
ed lodgings. About fifteen shillings I had em- 
ployed in re-establishing (though in a very hum- 
ble way) my dress. Of the remainder I gave 
one quarter to Ann, meaning on my return to 
have divided with her whatever might remain. 
These arrangements made, — soon after six 
o'clock, on a dark winter evening, I set off, ac- 
companied by Ann, towards Piccadilly ; for it 
was my intention to go down as far as Salt-hill 
on the Bath or Bristol Mail. Our course lay 
through a part of the town which has now all 
disappeared, so that I can no longer retrace its 
ancient boundaries : Swallow Street, I think it 
was called. Having time enough before us, 



58 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

however, we bore away to the left until we 
came into Golden square : there, near the cor- 
ner of Sherrard Street, we sate down ; not 
wishing to part in the tumult and blaze of Pic- 
cadilly. I had told her of my plans some time 
before : and now I assured her again that she 
should share in my good fortune, if I met with 
any ; and that I would never forsake her, as 
soon as I had power to protect her. This 1 fully 
intended, as much from inclination as from a 
sense of duty : for, setting aside gratitude, which 
in any case must have made me her debtor for 
life, I loved her as affectionately as if she had 
been my sister : and at this moment, with seven- 
fold tenderness, from pity at witnessing her ex- 
treme dejection. L had, apparently, most rea- 
son for dejection, because I was leaving the 
savior of my life : yet 1, considering the shock 
my health had received, was cheerful and full of 
hope. She, on the contrary, who was parting 
with one who had had little means of serving 
her, except by kindness and brotherly treatment, 
was overcome by sorrow ; so that, when I kissed 
her at our final farewell, she put her arms about 
my neck, and wept without speaking a word. 
I hoped to return in a week at farthest, and I 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 59 

agreed with her that on the fifth night from that, 
and every night afterwards, she should wait for 
me at six o'clock, near the bottom of Great 
Titchfield Street, which had been our customary 
haven, as it were, of rendezvous, to prevent our 
missing each other in the great Mediterranean 
of Oxford Street. This, and other measures of 
precaution I took : one only I forgot. She had 
either never told me, or (as a matter of no great 
interest) I had forgotten, her surname. It is a 
general practice, indeed, with girls of humble 
rank in her unhappy condition, not (as novel- 
reading women of higher pretensions) to style 
themselves — Miss Douglass, Miss Montague, 
he, but simply by their christian names, Mary, 
Jane, Frances, he. Her surname, as the surest 
means of tracing her, I ought now to have in- 
quired : but the truth is, having no reason to 
think that our meeting could, in consequence of 
a short interruption, be more difficult or uncer- 
tain than it had been for so many weeks, 1 had 
scarcely for a moment adverted to it as necessary, 
or placed it amongst my memoranda against 
this parting interview : and, my final anxieties 
being spent in comforting her with hopes, and 
in pressing upon her the necessity of getting 



60 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

some medicines for a violent cough and hoarse- 
ness with which she was troubled, I wholly for- 
got it until it was too late to recall her. 

It was past eight o'clock when I reached the 
Gloucester Coffee-house : and, the Bristol Mail 
being on the point of going off, I mounted on 
the outside. The fine fluent motion* of this 
Mail soon laid me asleep : it is somewhat re- 
markable, that the first easy or refreshing sleep 
which I had enjoyed for some months, was on 
the outside of a Mail-coach — a bed which, at 
this day, I find rather an uneasy one. Connect- 
ed with this sleep was a little incident, which 
served, as hundreds of others did at that time, 
to convince me how easily a man who has never 
been in any great distress, may pass through life 
without knowing, in his own person at least, any 
thing of the possible goodness of the human 
heart — or, as I must add with a sigh, of its pos- 
sible vileness. So thick a curtain of manners is 
drawn over the features and expression of men's 
natures, that to the ordinary observer, the two 

* The Bristol Mail is the best appointed in the kingdom 
— owing to the double advantage of an unusually good road, 
and of an extra sum for expenses subscribed by the Bristol 
merchants. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 61 

extremities, and the infinite field of varieties 
which lie between them, are all confounded — 
the vast and multitudinous compass of their sev- 
eral harmonies reduced to the meagre outline of 
differences expressed in the gamut or alphabet 
of elementary sounds. The case was this ; for 
the first four or five miles from London, I an- 
noyed my fellow passenger on the roof by occa- 
sionally falling against him when the coach gave 
a lurch to his side ; and indeed, if the road had 
been less smooth and level than it is, I should 
have fallen off from weakness. Of this annoy- 
ance he complained heavily, as perhaps, in the 
same circumstances most people would ; he ex- 
pressed his complaint, however, more morosely 
than the occasion seemed to warrant ; and, if I 
had parted with him at that moment, 1 should 
have thought of him (if I had considered it 
worth while to think of him at all) as a surly 
and almost brutal fellow. However, I was con- 
scious that I had given him some cause for com- 
plaint ; and, therefore, I apologized to him, and 
assured him I would do what I could to avoid 
falling asleep for the future ; and, at the same 
time, in as few words as possible, I explained to 
him that I was ill and in a weak state from long 



62 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

suffering ; and that I could not afford at that 
time to take an inside place. The man's 
manner changed, upon hearing this explana- 
tion, in an instant ; and when I next woke 
for a minute from the noise and lights of Houn- 
slow (for in spite of my wishes and efforts I 
had fallen asleep again within two minutes 
from the time I had spoken to him) 1 found that 
he had put his arm round me to protect me 
from falling off; and for the rest of my journey 
he behaved to me with the gentleness of a wo- 
man, so that, at length, I almost lay in his arms ; 
and this was the more kind, as he could not have 
known that 1 was not going the whole way to 
Bath or Bristol. Unfortunately, indeed, I did 
go rather farther than I intended ; for so genial 
and refreshing was my sleep, that the next time, 
after leaving Hounslow, that 1 fully awoke, was 
upon the sudden pulling up of the Mail, (possi- 
bly at a post-office,) and, on inquiry, I found 
that we had reached Maidenhead — six or seven 
miles, I think, ahead of Salt-hill. Here 1 
alighted ; and for the half minute that the Mail 
stopped, I was entreated by my friendly compan- 
ion (who, from the transient glimpse I had of 
him in Piccadilly, seemed to me to be a gentle- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 63 

man's butler — or person of that rank) to go to 
bed without delay. This I promised, though 
with no intention of doing so ; and in fact, I im- 
mediately set forward, or rather backward, on 
foot. It must then have been nearly midnight ; 
but so slowly did 1 creep along, that I heard a 
clock in a cottage strike four before I turned 
down the lane from Slough to Eton. The air 
and the sleep had both refreshed me ; but I was 
weary nevertheless. I remember a thought (ob- 
vious enough, and which has been prettily ex- 
pressed by a Roman poet) which gave me some 
consolation at that moment under my poverty. 
There had been some time before a murder com- 
mitted on or near Hounslow-heath. I think I 
cannot be mistaken when I say that the name of 
the murdered person was Steele, and that he 
was the owner of a lavender plantation in that 
neighborhood. Every step of my progress was 
bringing me nearer to the Heath ; and it natu- 
rally occurred to me that I and the accursed 
murderer, if he were that night abroad, might 
at every instant be unconsciously approaching 
each other through the darkness ; in which case, 
said I. — supposing I, instead of being (as in- 
deed I am) little better than an outcast, — 



64 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Lord of my learning and no land beside, 

were, like my friend, Lord , heir by general 

repute, to £70,000 per ann., what a panic 
should 1 be under at this moment about my 
throat ! — indeed, it was not likely that Lord 
should ever be in my situation. But nev- 
ertheless, the spirit of the remark remains true 
— that vast power and possessions make a man 
shamefully afraid of dying ; and I am convinced 
that many of the most intrepid adventurers, who, 
by fortunately being poor, enjoy the full use of 
their natural courage, would, if at the very in- 
stant of going into action news were brought to 
them that they had unexpectedly succeeded to 
an estate in England of £50,000 a year, feel 
their dislike to bullets considerably sharpened,* 
and their efforts at perfect equanimity and self- 
possession proportionably difficult. So true it is, 
in the language of a wise man whose own expe- 
rience had made him acquainted with both for- 
tunes, that riches are better fitted — 

* It will be objected tbat many men, of the highest rank 
and wealth, have in our own day, as well as throughout 
our history, been amongst the foremost in courting danger 
in battle. True ; but this is not the case supposed ; long 
familiarity with power has to them deadened its effect and 
its attractions. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 65 

To slacken virtue and abate her edge, 

Than tempt her to do aught may merit praise. 

Paradise Regained. 

I dally with my subject because, to myself, 
the remembrance of these times is profoundly 
interesting. But my reader shall not have any 
further cause to complain ; for I now hasten to 
its close. In the road between Slough and Eton 
1 fell asleep ; and, just as the morning began to 
dawn, I was awakened by the voice of a man 
standing over me and surveying rne. I know not 
what he was ; he was an ill-looking fellow — 
but not therefore of necessity an ill-meaning fel- 
low ; or, if he were, I suppose he thought that 
no person sleeping out-of-doors in winter could 
be worth robbing. In which conclusion, how- 
ever, as it regarded myself, I beg to assure him, 
if he should be among my readers, that he was 
mistaken. After a slight remark he passed on ; 
1 was not sorry at his disturbance, as it enabled 
me to pass through Eton before people were 
generally up. The night had been heavy and 
lowering ; but towards the morning it had 
changed to a slight frost ; and the ground and 
the trees were now covered with rime. I slip- 
ped through Eton unobserved ; washed myself, 
5 



Ob CONFESSIONS OF AN 

and, as far as possible, adjusted my dress at a little 
public house in Windsor ; and about eight o'clock 
went down towards Pote's. On my road I met 
some junior boys of whom I made inquiries ; an 
Etonian is always a gentleman ; and, in spite of 
my shabby habiliments, they answered me civ- 
illy. My friend, Lord , was gone to the 

University of . " Ibi omnis effusus labor ! " 

I had, however, other friends at Eton ; but it is 
not to all who wear that name in prosperity that 
a man is willing to present himself in distress. 
On recollecting myself, however, I asked for the 
Earl of D , to whom, (though my acquaint- 
ance with him was not so intimate as with some 
others) 1 should not have shrunk from presenting 
myself under any circumstances. He was still 
at Eton, though I believe on the wing for Cam- 
bridge. I called, was received kindly, and 
asked to breakfast. 

Here let me stop for a moment to check my 
reader from any erroneous conclusions ; because 
I have had occasion incidentally to speak of va- 
rious patrician friends, it must not be supposed 
that I have myself any pretensions to rank or 
high blood. I thank God that I have not ; I 
am the son of a plain English merchant, es- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 67 

teemed during his life for his great integrity, and 
strongly attached to literary pursuits (indeed, he 
was himself, anonymously, an author ;) if he 
had lived, it was expected that he would have 
been very rich ; but, dying prematurely, he left 
no more than about £30,000 amongst seven 
different claimants. My mother I may mention 
with honor, as still more highly gifted. For, 
though unpretending to the name and honors of 
a literary woman, I shall presume to call her 
(what many literary women are not) an intel- 
lectual woman ; and I believe that if ever her 
letters should be collected and published, they 
would be thought generally to exhibit as much 
strong and masculine sense, delivered in as pure 
" mother English," racy and fresh with idiomatic 
graces, as any in our language — hardly except- 
ing those of lady M. W. Montague. These 
are my honors of descent ; I have no others ; 
and I have thanked God sincerely that I have 
not, because, in my judgment, a station which 
raises a man too eminently above the level of 
his fellow creatures is not the most favorable to 
moral, or to intellectual qualities. 

Lord D placed before me a most mag- 
nificent breakfast. It was really so ; but in my 



68 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

eyes it seemed trebly magnificent — from being 
the first regular meal, the first " good man's ta- 
ble," that I had sate down to for months. 
Strange to say, however, I could scarcely eat 
any thing. On the day when I first received 
my £10 bank note, I had gone to a baker's 
shop and bought a couple of rolls ; this very 
shop I had two months or six weeks before sur- 
veyed with an eagerness of desire which it was 
almost humiliating to me to recollect. I remem- 
bered the story about Otway ; and feared that 
there might be danger in eating too rapidly. But 
I had no need for alarm, my appetite was quite 
sunk, and I became sick before I had eaten half 
of what I had bought. This effect from eating 
what approached to a meal, I continued to feel 
for weeks ; or, when I did not experience any 
nausea, part of what I ate was rejected, some- 
times with acidity, sometimes immediately, and 
without any acidity. On the present occasion, 

at Lord D 's table, I found myself not at all 

better than usual ; and, in the midst of luxuries, 
I had no appetite. I had, however, unfortu- 
nately, at all times a craving for wine ; I ex- 
plained my situation, therefore, to Lord D , 

and gave him a short account of my late suffer- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 69 

ings, at which he expressed great compassion, 
and called for wine. This gave me a momen- 
tary relief and pleasure ; and on all occasions 
when I had an opportunity, I never failed to 
drink wine — which I worshipped then as I have 
since worshipped opium. I am convinced, how- 
ever, that this indulgence in wine continued to 
strengthen my malady ; for the tone of my stom- 
ach was apparently quite sunk ; but by a better 
regimen it might sooner, and perhaps effectually, 
have been revived. I hope that it was not from 
this love bf wine that I lingered in the neighbor- 
hood of my Eton friends ; I persuaded myself 
then that it was from reluctance to ask of Lord 
D , on whom I was conscious I had not suf- 
ficient claims, the particular service in quest of 
which I had come to Eton. I was, however, 
unwilling to lose my journey, and — I asked it. 
Lord D , whose good nature was unbound- 
ed, and which, in regard to myself, had been 
measured rather by his compassion perhaps for 
my condition, and his knowledge of my intimacy 
with some of his relatives, than by an over rig- 
orous inquiry into the extent of my own direct 
claims, faltered, nevertheless, at this request. 
He acknowledged that he did not like to have 



70 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

any dealings with money-lenders, and feared 
lest such a transaction might come to the ears of 
his connexions. Moreover, he doubted whether 
his signature, whose expectations were so much 

more bounded than those of , would avail 

with my unchristian friends. However, he did 
not wish, as it seemed, to mortify me by an ab- 
solute refusal ; for after a little consideration, he 
promised, under certain conditions, which he 

pointed out, to give his security. Lord D 

was at this time not eighteen years of age ; but 
I have often doubted, on recollecting since, the 
good sense and prudence which on this occasion 
he mingled with so much urbanity of manner, 
(an urbanity which in him wore the grace of 
youthful sincerity,) whether any statesman — 
the oldest and the most accomplished in diplo- 
macy — could have acquitted himself better un- 
der the same circumstances. Most people, in- 
deed, cannot be addressed on such a business, 
without surveying you with looks as austere and 
unpropitious as those of a Saracen's head. 

Recomforted by this promise, which was not 
quite equal to the best, but far above the worst 
that I had pictured to myself as possible,! returned 
in a Windsor coach to London three days after 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 71 

I had quitted it. And now I come to the end 
of my story ; the Jews did not approve of Lord 

D 's terms ; whether they would in the end 

have acceded to them, and were only seeking 
time for making due inquiries, 1 know not ; but 
many delays were made — time passed on — 
the small fragment of my bank note had just 
melted away ; and before any conclusion could 
have been put to the business, I must have re- 
lapsed into my former state of wretchedness. 
Suddenly, however, at this crisis, an opening 
was made, almost by accident, for reconciliation 
with my friends. I quitted London in haste, for 
a remote part of England ; after some time, I 
proceeded to the university ; and it was not until 
many months had passed away, that I had it in 
my power again to revisit the ground which had 
become so interesting to me, and to this day re- 
mains so, as the chief scene of my youthful suf- 
ferings. 

Meantime, what had become of poor Ann ? 
For her I have reserved my concluding words ; 
according to our agreement, I sought her daily, 
and waited for her every night, so long as I staid 
in London, at the corner of Titchfield-street. I 
inquired for her of every one who was likely to 



72 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

know her ; and during the last hours of my stay 
in London, I put into activity every means of 
tracing her that my knowledge of London sug- 
gested, and the limited extent of my power 
made possible. The street where she had 
lodged I knew, but not the house ; and I remem- 
ber at last some account which she had given 
of ill treatment from her landlord, which made 
it probable that she had quitted those lodgings 
before we parted. She had few acquaintance ; 
most people, besides, thought that the earnest- 
ness of my inquiries arose from motives which 
moved their laughter, or their slight regard ; and 
others, thinking that I was in chase of a girl who 
had robbed me of some trifles, were naturally 
and excusably indisposed to give me any clue 
to her, if, indeed, they had any to give. Finally, 
as my despairing resource, on the day I left Lon- 
don I put into the hands of the only person who 
(I was sure) must know Ann by sight, from 
having been in company with us once or twice, 

an address to in shire, at that time 

the residence of my family. But, to this hour, 
1 have never heard a syllable about her. This, 
amongst such troubles as most men meet with in 
this life, has been my heaviest affliction. If she 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 73 

lived, doubtless we must have been sometimes 
in search of each other, at the very same mo- 
ment, through the mighty labyrinths of London ; 
perhaps, even within a few feet of each other — 
a barrier no wider in a London street, often 
amounting in the end to a separation for eter- 
nity ! During some years, I hoped that she did 
live ; and 1 suppose that, in the literal and un- 
rhetorical use of the word myriad, I may say 
that on my different visits to London, I have 
looked into many, many myriads of female 
faces, in the hope of meeting her. I should know 
her again amongst a thousand, if I saw her for 
a moment ; for, though not handsome, she had 
a sweet expression of countenance, and a pecu- 
liar and graceful carriage of the head. I sought 
her, I have said, in hope. So it was for years ; 
but now I shouldTear to see her ; and her cough, 
which grieved me when I parted with her, is 
now my consolation. I now wish to see her no 
longer ; but think of her, more gladly, as one 
long since laid in the grave ; in the grave, I 
would hope, of a Magdalen ; taken away, before 
injuries and cruelty had blotted out and transfig- 
ured her ingenuous nature, or the brutalities of 
ruffians had completed the ruin they had begun. 



74 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

So then, Oxford Street, stony-hearted step- 
mother ! thou that listenest to the sighs of or- 
phans, and drinkest the tears of children, at 
length I was dismissed from thee : the time was 
come at last that I no more should pace in an- 
guish thy never-ending terraces ; no more should 
dream, and wake in captivity to the pangs of 
hunger. Successors, too many, to myself and 
Ann, have, doubtless, since then trodden in our 
footsteps ; inheritors of our calamities : other 
orphans than Ann have sighed : tears have been 
shed by other children : and thou, Oxford Street, 
hast since echoed to the groans of innumerable 
hearts. For myself, however, the storm which 
I had outlived seemed to have been the pledge 
of a long fair weather ; the premature sufferings 
which I had paid down, to have been accepted 
as a ransom for many years to come, as a price 
of long immunity from sorrow : and if again I 
walked in London, a solitary and contemplative 
man, (as oftentimes I did,) I walked for the most 
part in serenity and peace of mind. And, al- 
though it is true that the calamities of my novi- 
ciate in London had struck root so deeply in 
my bodily constitution that afterwards they shot 
up and flourished afresh, and grew into a noxious 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 75 

umbrage that has overshadowed and darkened 
my latter years, yet these second assaults of 
suffering were met with a fortitude more con- 
firmed, with the resources of a maturer intellect, 
and with alleviations from sympathising affec- 
tion — how deep and tender ! 

Thus, however, with whatsoever alleviations, 
years that were far asunder were bound together 
by subtle links of suffering deprived from a 
common root. And herein I notice an instance 
of the short-sightedness of human desires, that 
oftentimes on moonlight nights, during my first 
mournful abode in London, my consolation was 
(if such it could be thought) to gaze from Ox- 
ford Street up every avenue in succession which 
pierces through the heart of Mary-le-bone to 
the fields and the woods ; for that, said I, travel- 
ing with my eyes up the long vistas which lay 
part in light and part in shade, " that is the road 

to the north, and therefore to , and if I had 

the wings of a dove, that way I would fly for 
comfort." Thus I said, and thus I wished in 
my blindness ; yet, even in that very northern 
region it was, in that very valley, nay, in that 
very house to which my erroneous wishes point- 
ed, that this second birth of my sufferings be- 



76 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

gan ; and that they again threatened to besiege 
the citadel of life and hope. There it was, that 
for years I was persecuted by visions as ugly, 
and as ghastly phantoms as ever haunted the 
couch of an Orestes : and in this unhappier 
than he, that sleep which comes to all as a 
respite and a restoration, and to him especially 
as a blessed balm for his wounded heart and his 
haunted brain, visited me as my bitterest scourge. 
Thus blind was I in my desires ; yet, if a veil 
interposes between the dim-sightedness of man 
and his future calamities, the same veil hides 
from him their alleviations ; and a grief which 
had not been feared is met by consolations which 
had not been hoped. I, therefore, who parti- 
cipated, as it were, in the troubles of Orestes, 
(excepting only in his agitated conscience,) par- 
ticipated no less in all his supports ; my Eu- 
menides, like his, were at my bed-feet, and 
stared in upon me through the curtains ; but, 
watching by my pillow, or defrauding herself of 
sleep to bear me company through the heavy 
watches of the night, sate my Electra : for thou, 
beloved M., dear companion of my later years, 
thou wast my Electra ! and neither in nobility 
of mind nor in long suffering affection, wouldst 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 77 

permit that a Grecian sister should excel an En- 
glish wife. For thou thoughtst not much to 
stoop to humble offices of kindness, and to servile 
ministrations of tenderest affection ; to wipe 
away for years the unwholesome dews upon the 
forehead, or to refresh the lips when parched 
and baked with fever ; nor, even when thy own 
peaceful slumbers had by long sympathy be- 
come infected with the spectacle of my dread 
contest with phantoms and shadowy enemies, 
that oftentimes bade me " sleep no more !" — 
not even then, didst thou utter a complaint or 
any murmur, nor withdraw thy angelic smiles, 
nor shrink from thy service of love more than 
Electra did of old. For she too, though she 
was a Grecian woman, and the daughter of the 
king* of men, yet wept sometimes, and hid her 
facef in her robe. 

* Agamemnon. 

t Ouiia Qeis eiso nemov. The scholar will know that 
throughout this passage I refer to the early scenes of the 
Orestes ; one of the most beautiful exhibitions of the do- 
mestic affections which even the dramas of Euripides can 
furnish. To the English reader, it may be necessary to 
say, that the situation at the opening of the drama is that 
of a brother attended only by his sister during the demon- 



78 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

But these troubles are past : and thou wilt 
read these records of a period so dolorous to us 
both as the legend of some hideous dream that 
can return no more. Meantime I am again in 
London ; and again I pace the terraces of Ox- 
ford Street by night : and oftentimes, when I 
am oppressed by anxieties that demand all my 
philosophy and the comfort of thy presence to 
support, and yet remember that I am separated 
from thee by three hundred miles, and the length 
of three dreary months, — I look up the streets 
that run northward from Oxford Street, upon 
moonlight nights, and recollect my youthful 
ejaculation of anguish ; and remembering that 
thou art sitting alone in that same valley, and 
mistress of that very house to which my heart 
turned in its blindness nineteen years ago, I 
think that, though blind indeed, and scattered to 
the winds of late, the promptings of my heart 
may yet have had reference to a remoter time, 
and may be justified if read in another meaning ; 
— and, if I could allow myself to descend again 

iacal possession of a suffering conscience, (or, in the mytho- 
logy of the play haunted by the furies,) and in circum- 
stances of immediate danger from enemies, and of desertion 
or cold regard from nominal friends. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 79 

to the impotent wishes of childhood, I should 
again say to myself, as 1 look to the north, " Oh 
that [ had the wings of a dove — " and with 
how just a confidence in thy good and gracious 
nature might I add the other half of my early 
ejaculation — " And that way I would fly for 
comfort." 



THE PLEASURES OF OPIUM. 



It is so long since I first took opium, that if it 
had been a trifling incident in my life, I might 
have forgotten its date ; but cardinal events are 
not to be forgotten ; and from circumstances 
connected with it, I remember that it must be 
referred to the autumn of 1804. During that 
season I was in London, having come thither for 
the first time since my entrance at college. 
And my introduction to opium arose in the fol- 
lowing way. From an early age I had been 
accustomed to wash my head in cold water at 
least once a day ; being suddenly seized with 
tooth-ache, I attributed it to some relaxation 
caused by an accidental intermission of that 
practice ; jumped out of bed ; plunged my head 
into a basin of cold water ; and with hair thus 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 81 

wetted went to sleep. The next morning, as 1 
need hardly say, I awoke with excruciating rheu- 
matic pains of the head and face, from which I 
had hardly any respite for about twenty days. 
On the twenty-first day, I think it was, and on 
a Sunday, that I went out into the streets ; 
rather to run away, if possible, from my tor- 
ments, than with any distinct purpose. By ac- 
cident I met a college acquaintance who recom- 
mended opium. Opium ! dread agent of unim- 
aginable pleasure and pain ! I had heard of it 
as I had heard of manna or of ambrosia, but no 
further ; how unmeaning a sound was it at that 
time ! what solemn chords does it now strike 
upon my heart ! what heart quaking vibrations 
of sad and happy remembrances ! Reverting 
for a moment to these, I feel a mystic import- 
ance attached to the minutest circumstances 
connected with the place and the time, and the 
man (if man he was) that first laid open to me 
the Paradise of opium-eaters. It was a Sunday 
afternoon, wet and cheerless ; and a duller spec- 
tacle this earth of ours has not to show than a 
rainy Sunday in London. My road homewards 
lay through Oxford-street ; and near " the stately 
Pantheon," (as Mr. Wordsworth has obligingly 
6 



82 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

called it) I saw a druggist's shop. The druggist, 
unconscious minister of celestial pleasures ! — 
as if in sympathy with the rainy Sunday, looked 
dull and stupid, just as any mortal druggist might 
be expected to look on a Sunday ; and, when I 
asked for the tincture of opium, he gave it to me 
as any other man might do ; and furthermore, 
out of my shilling, returned to me what seemed to 
be a real copper halfpence, taken out of a real 
wooden drawer. Nevertheless, in spite of such 
indications of humanity, he has ever since exist- 
ed in my mind as a beatific vision of an immor- 
tal druggist sent down to earth on a special mis- 
sion to myself. And it confirms me in this way 
of considering him, that, when I next came up 
to London, I sought him near the stately Pan- 
theon, and found him not : and thus to me, who 
knew not his name (if indeed he had one) he 
seemed rather to have vanished from Oxford- 
street than to have removed in any bodily fash- 
ion. The reader may choose to think of him 
as, possibly, no more than a sublunary druggist : 
it may be so ; but my faith is better ; I believe 
him to have evanesced,* or evaporated. So 

* Evanesced : — this way of going off the stage of life 
appears to have been well known in the 17th century, but 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. ©3 

unwillingly would I connect any mortal remem- 
brances with that hour, and place, and creature, 
that first brought me acquainted with the celes- 
tial drug. 

Arrived at my lodgings, it may be supposed 
that I lost not a moment in taking the quantity 
prescribed. I was necessarily ignorant of the 
whole art and mystery of opium-taking ; and, 
what I took, I took under every disadvantage. 
But I took it ; — and in an hour, oh ! Heavens! 
what a revulsion ! what an upheaving, from its 
lowest depths, of the inner spirit ! what an apoc- 
alypse of the world within me ! That my 
pains had vanished, was now a trifle in my eyes : 
this negative effect was swallowed up in the im- 
mensity of those positive effects which had 
opened before me — in the abyss of divine en- 
joyment thus suddenly revealed. Here was a 

at that time to have been considered a peculiar privilege of 
blood royal, and by no means to be allowed to druggists. 
For about the year 1686 a poet of rather ominous name (and 
who, by-the-by, did ample justice to his name,) viz. Mr. 
Flat-maw, in speaking of the death of Charles II, ex- 
presses his surprise that any prince should commit so ab- 
surd an act as dying ; because, says he, 

Kings should disdain to die, and only disappear, 
They should abscond, that is, into the other world. 



84 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



panacea — a (paguaxov rt7iavda$ for all human 
woes ; here was the secret of happiness, about 
which philosophers had disputed for so many 
ages, at once discovered ; happiness might now 
be bought for a penny, and carried in the waist- 
coat pocket ; portable ecstacies might be had 
corked up in a pint bottle ; and peace of mind 
could be sent down in gallons by the mail- 
coach. But, if I talk in this way the reader 
will think 1 am laughing ; and I can assure him 
that no body will laugh long who deals much 
with opium ; its pleasures even are of a grave 
and solemn complexion ; and in his happiest 
state, the opium-eater cannot present himself in 
the character of V Allegro ; even then, he speaks 
and thinks as becomes 17 Pcnseroso. Never- 
theless, I have a very reprehensible way of jest- 
ing at times in the midst of my own misery ; 
and, unless when I am checked by some more 
powerful feelings, I am afraid I shall be guilty 
of this indecent practice even in these annals of 
suffering or enjoyment. The reader must al- 
low a little to my infirm nature in this respect ; 
and with a few indulgences of that sort, I shall 
endeavor to be as grave, if not drowsy, as fits a 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 85 

theme like opium, so anti-mercurial as it really 
is, and so drowsy as it is falsely reputed. 

And, first, one word with respect to its bodily 
effects ; for upon all that has been hitherto writ- 
ten on the subject of opium, whether by travel- 
ers in Turkey (who may plead their privilege 
of lying as an old immemorial right,) or by pro- 
fessors of medicine, writing ex cathedra ; I have 
but one emphatic criticism to pronounce — Lies ! 
lies ! lies ! 1 remember once, in passing a book- 
stall, to have caught these words from a page of 
some satiric author : " By this time I became 
convinced that the London newspapers spoke 
truth at least twice a week, viz. on Tuesday and 
Saturday, and might safely be depended upon 
for — the list of bankrupts." In like manner, I 
do by no means deny that some truths have been 
delivered to the world in regard to opium ; thus, 
it has been repeatedly affirmed by the learned, 
that opium is a dusky brown in color ; and this, 
take notice, I grant ; secondly, that it is rather 
dear ; which also I grant ; for in my time, East 
India opium has been three guineas a pound, 
and Turkey eight ; and, thirdly, that if you eat 
a good deal of it, most probably you must — do 
what is particularly disagreeable to any man of 



S6 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

regular habits, viz., — die.* These weighty pro- 
positions are, all and singular, true ; I cannot 
gainsay them ; and truth ever was, and will be, 
commendable. But in these three theorems, I 
believe we have exhausted the stock of knowl- 
edge as yet accumulated by man on the subject 
of opium. And therefore, worthy doctors, as 
there seems to be room for further discoveries, 
stand aside, and allow me to come forward and 
lecture on this matter. 

First, then, it is not so much affirmed as ta- 
ken for granted, by all who ever mention opium, 
formally or incidentally, that it does, or can, 
produce intoxication. Now, reader, assure your- 
self, meo periculo, that no quantity of opium 
ever did, or could intoxicate. As to the tincture 
of opium (commonly called laudanum) that 
might certainly intoxicate if a man could bear 

* Of this, however, the learned appear latterly to have 
doubted: for in a pirated edition of Buchan's Domestic 
Medicine, which I once saw in the hands of a farmer's 
wife who was studying it for the benefit of her health, the 
Doctor was made to say — " Be particularly careful never 
to take above five-and-twenty ounces of laudanum at 
once ;" the true reading being probably five-and-twenty 
drops, which are held to be equal to about one grain of 
crude opium. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 87 

to take enough of it ; but why ? because it con- 
tains so much proof spirit, and not because it 
contains so much opium. But crude opium, I 
affirm peremptorily, is incapable of producing 
any state of body at all resembling that which is 
produced by alcohol ; and not in degree only 
incapable, but even in kind; it is not in the 
quantity of its effects merely, but in the quality, 
that it differs altogether. The pleasure given by 
wine is always mounting, and tending to a cri- 
sis, after which it declines ; that from opium, 
when once generated, is stationary for eight or 
ten hours ; the first, to borrow a technical dis- 
tinction from medicine, is a case of acute — the 
second, of chronic pleasure ; the one is a flame, 
the other a steady and equable glow. But the 
main distinction lies in this, that whereas wine 
disorders the mental faculties, opium, on the con- 
trary, (if taken in a proper manner,) introduces 
amongst them the most exquisite order, legisla- 
tion, and harmony. Wine robs a man of his 
self-possession ; opium greatly invigorates it. 
Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment, and 
gives a preternatural brightness, and a vivid ex- 
altation to the contempts and the admira- 
tions, to the loves and the hatreds, of the drink- 
er; opium, on the contrary, communicates 



SO CONFESSIONS OF AN 

serenity and equapoise to all the faculties, active 
or passive ; and with respect to the temper and 
moral feelings in general, it gives simply that 
sort of vital warmth which is approved by the 
judgment, and which would probably always 
accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or 
antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium, 
like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and 
the benevolent affections ; but then, with this 
remarkable difference, that in the sudden devel- 
opment of kind-heartedness which accompanies 
inebriation, there is always more or less of a 
maudlin character, which exposes it to the con- 
tempt of the bystander. Men shake hands, 
swear eternal friendship, and shed tears — no 
mortal knows why ; and the sensual creature is 
clearly uppermost. But the expansion of the 
benigner feelings, incident to opium, is no febrile 
access, but a healthy restoration to that state 
which the mind would naturally recover upon 
the removal of any deep-seated irritation of pain 
that had disturbed and quarrelled with the im- 
pulses of a heart originally just and good. 
True it is, that even wine, up to a certain point, 
and with certain men, rather tends to exalt and 
to steady the intellect ; 1 myself, who have 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 89 

never been a great wine-drinker, used to find 
that half a dozen glasses of wine advantageously 
affected the faculties — brightened and intensi- 
fied the consciousness — and gave to the mind 
a feeling of being " ponderibus librata suis ;" 
and certainly it is most absurdly said, in popular 
language, of any man, that he is disguised in 
liquor ; for, on the contrary, most men are dis- 
guised by sobriety ; and it is when they are 
drinking, (as some old gentleman says in Athe- 
na3us,) that men display themselves in their true 
complexion of character ; which surely is not dis- 
guising themselves. But still, wine constantly 
leads a man to the brink of absurdity and extrav- 
agance ; and, beyond a certain point, it is sure to 
volatilize and to disperse the intellectual energies; 
whereas opium always seems to compose what 
had been agitated, and to concentrate what had 
been distracted. In short, to sum up all in one 
word, a man who is inebriated, or tending to in- 
ebriation, is, and feels that he is, in a condition 
which calls up into supremacy the merely hu- 
man, too often the brutal, part of his nature ; 
but the opium-eater (I speak of him who is not 
suffering from any disease, or other remote ef- 
fects of opium) feels that the diviner part of his 



90 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

nature is paramount ; that is, the moral affec- 
tions are in a state of cloudless serenity ; and 
over all is the great light of the majestic in- 
tellect. 

This is the doctrine of the true church on the 
subject of opium : of which church I acknowl- 
edge myself to be the only member — the alpha 
and omega : but then it is to be recollected, that 
1 speak from the ground of a large and profound 
personal experience : whereas most of the un- 
scientific* authors who have at all treated of 

* Amongst the great herd of travelers, &c. who show 
sufficiently by their stupidity that they never held any in- 
tercourse with opium, I must caution my readers specially 
against the brilliant author of " Anastasius." This gen- 
tleman, whose wit would lead one to presume him an 
opium-eater, has made it impossible to consider him in 
that character, from the grievous misrepresentation which 
he has given of its effects, at page 215 — 17, of vol. 1. 
Upon consideration, it must appear such to the author him- 
self : for, waiving the errors I have insisted on in the text, 
which (and others) are adopted in the fullest manner, he 
will himself admit, that an old gentleman, "with a snow- 
white beard," who eats " ample doses of opium," and is 
yet able to deliver what is meant and received as very 
weighty counsel on the bad effects of that practice, is but 
an indifferent evidence that opium either kills people pre- 
maturely, or sends them into a mad-house. But, for my 
part, I see into this old gentleman and his motives ; the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 91 

opium, and even of those who have written 
expressly on the materia medica, make it evi- 
dent, from the horror they express of it, 
that their experimental knowledge of its ac- 
tion is none at all. I will, however, candidly 
acknowledge that I have met with one person 
who bore evidence to its intoxicating power, 
such as staggered my own incredulity : for he 
was a surgeon, and had himself taken opium 
largely. I happened to say to him, that his 
enemies (as I had heard) charged him with 
talking nonsense on politics, and that his friends 
apologized for him, by suggesting that he was 
constantly in a state of intoxication from opium. 
Now the accusation, said I, is not prima facie, 
and of necessity, an absurd one : but the de- 
fence is. To my surprise, however, he insisted, 
that both his enemies and his friends were in the 



fact is, he was enamoured of " the little golden receptacle of 
the pernicious drug," which Anastasius carried about him; 
and no way of obtaining it so safe and so feasible occurred, 
as that of frightening its owner out of his wits, (which, 
by-the-by, are none of the strongest.) This commentary 
throws a new light upon the case, and greatly improves 
it as a story : for the old gentleman's speech, considered 
as a lecture on pharmacy, is highly absurd : but, consider- 
ed as a hoax on Anastatius, it reads excellently. 



92 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



right : " I will maintain," said he, " that I do 
talk nonsense ; and secondly, I will maintain 
that I do not talk nonsense upon principle, or 
with any view to profit, but solely and simply, 
said he, solely and simply, — solely and simply, 
(repeating it three times over,) because I am 
drunk with opium ; and that daily." I replied 
that, as to the allegation of his enemies, as it 
seemed to be established upon such respectable 
testimony, seeing that the three parties concerned 
all agreed in it, it did not become me to question 
it ; but the defence set up I must demur to. He 
proceeded to discuss the matter, and to lay down 
his reasons ; but it seemed to me so impolite to 
pursue an argument which must have presumed 
a man mistaken in a point belonging to his own 
profession, that I did not press him even when 
his course of argument seemed open to objec- 
tion : not to mention that a man who talks non- 
sense, even though " with no view to profit," is 
not altogether the most agreeable partner in a 
dispute, whether as opponent or respondent. I 
confess, however, that the authority of a surgeon, 
and one who was reputed a good one, may seem 
a weighty one to my prejudice : but still I must 
plead my experience, which was greater than his 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 93 

greatest by seven thousand drops a day ; and, 
though it was not possible to suppose a medical 
man unacquainted with the characteristic symp- 
toms of vinous intoxication, it yet struck me that 
he might proceed on a logical error of using the 
word intoxication with too great latitude, and 
extending it generically to all modes of nervous 
excitement, instead of restricting it as the ex- 
pression for a specific sort of excitement, con- 
nected with certain diagnostics. Some people 
have maintained, in my hearing, that they had 
been drunk upon green tea : and a medical stu- 
dent in London, for whose knowledge in his 
profession 1 have reason to feel great respect, 
assured me, the other day, that a patient, in re- 
covering from an illness, had got drunk on a 
beef-steak. 

Having dwelt so much on this first and leading 
error, in respect to opium, I shall notice very 
briefly a second and a third ; which are, that 
the elevation of spirits produced by opium is 
necessarily followed by a proportionate depres- 
sion, and that the natural and even immediate 
consequence of opium is torpor and stagnation, 
animal and mental. The first of these errors I 
shall content myself with simply denying j as- 



94 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

suring my reader, that for ten years, during 
which I took opium at intervals, the day suc- 
ceeding to that on which I allowed myself this 
luxury was always a day of unusually good 
spirits. 

Wittfrespect to the torpor supposed to follow, 
or rather, (if we were to credit the numerous 
pictures of Turkish opium-eaters,) to accom- 
pany the practice of opium-eating, I deny that 
also. Certainly, opium is classed under the 
head of narcotics ; and some such effect it may 
produce in the end : but the primary effects of 
opium are always, and in the highest degree, to 
excite and stimulate the system : this first stage 
of its action always lasted with me, during my 
noviciate, for upwards of eight hours ; so that it 
must be the fault of the opium-eater himself if 
he does not so time his exhibition of the dose 
(to speak medically) as that the whole weight 
of its narcotic influence may descend upon his 
sleep. Turkish opium-eaters, it seems, are ab- 
surd enough to sit, like so many equestrian statues, 
on logs of wood as stupid as themselves. But 
that the reader may judge of the degree in 
which opium is likely to stupify the faculties of 
an Englishman, I shall (by way of treating the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 95 

question illustratively, rather than argumentative- 
ly) describe the way in which I myself often 
passed an opium evening in London, during the 
period between 1804 — 1812. It will be seen, 
that at least opium did not move me to seek 
solitude, and much less to seek inactivity, or the 
torpid state of self-involution ascribed to the 
Turks. I give this account at the risk of being 
pronounced a crazy enthusiast or visionary : but 
I regard that little : I must desire my reader to 
bear in mind, that I was a hard student, and at 
severe studies for all the rest of my time : and 
certainly I had a right occasionally to relaxations 
as well as other people ; these, however, 1 allow- 
ed myself but seldom. 

The late Duke of used to say, " Next 

Friday, by the blessing of heaven, I purpose to 
be drunk ;" and in like manner I used to fix 
beforehand how often, within a given time, and 
when, I would commit a debauch of opium. 
This was seldom more than once in three weeks : 
for at that time I could not have ventured to 
call every day (as I did afterwards, for " a glass 
of laudanum negus, warm, and without sugar. ," 
No : as I have said, I seldom drank laudanum, 
at that time, more than once in three weeks : 



96 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



this was usually on a Tuesday or a Saturday 
night : my reason for which was this. In those 
days Grassini sang at the Opera : and her voice 
was delightful to me beyond all that I had ever 
heard. I know not what may be the state of 
the Opera-house now, having never been within 
its walls for seven or eight years, but at that 
time it was by much the most pleasant place of 
public resort in London for passing an evening. 
Five shillings admitted one to the gallery, which 
was subject to far less annoyance than the pit of 
the theatres ; the orchestra was distinguished by 
its sweet and melodious grandeur, from all Eng- 
lish orchestras, the composition of which, I con- 
fess, is not acceptable to my ear, from the predom- 
inance of the clangorous instruments, and the abso- 
lute tyranny of the violin. The chorusses were 
divine to hear : and when Grassini appeared in 
some interlude, as she often did, and poured forth 
her passionate soul as Andromache, at the tomb of 
Hector, &c, I question whether any Turk, of 
all that ever entered the paradise of opium-eaters, 
can have had half the pleasure I had. But, 
indeed, I honor the barbarians too much by 
supposing them capable of any pleasures ap- 
proaching to the intellectual ones of an English- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 97 

man. For music is an intellectual or a sensual 
pleasure, according to the temperament of him 
who hears it. And, by-the-by, with the excep- 
tion of the fine extravaganza on that subject in 
Twelfth Night, I do not recollect more than one 
thing said adequately on the subject of music in 
all literature : it is a passage in the Religio 
Medici* of Sir T. Brown ; and, though chiefly 
remarkable for its sublimity, has also a philoso • 
phic value, inasmuch as it points to the true 
theory of musical effects. The mistake of most 
people is, to suppose that it is by the ear they 
communicate with music, and, therefore, that 
they are purely passive to its effects. But this 
is not so : it is by the reaction of the mind upon 
the notices of the ear, (the matter coming by 
the senses, the form from the mind,) that the 
pleasure is constructed : and therefore it is that 
people of equally good ear differ so much in 
this point from one another. Now opium, by 
greatly increasing the activity of the mind, 
generally increases, of necessity, that particular 

* I have not the hook at this moment to consult : but I 
think the passage begins — " And even that tavern music, 
which makes one man merry, another mad, in me strikes 
a deep fit of devotion," &c. 

7 



98 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

mode of its activity by which we are able to 
construct out of the raw material of organic 
sound an elaborate intellectual pleasure. But, 
says a friend, a succession of musical sounds is 
to me like a collection of Arabic characters : 
I can attach no ideas to them. Ideas ! my good 
sir? there is no occasion for them : all that class 
of ideas, which can be available in such a case, 
has a language of representative feelings. But 
this is a subject foreign to my present purposes : 
it is sufficient to say, that a chorus, &c, of 
elaborate harmony, displayed before me, as in a 
piece of arras-work, the whole of my past life — 
not, as if recalled by an act of memory, but as 
if present and incarnated in the music : no 
longer painful to dwell upon : but the detail of 
its incidents removed, or blended in some hazy 
abstraction : and its passions exalted, spiritual- 
ized, and sublimed. All this was to be had for 
five shillings. And over and above the music 
of the stage and the orchestra, I had all around 
me, in the intervals of the performance, the mu- 
sic of the Italian language talked by Italian 
women : for the gallery was usually crowded 
with Italians : and I listened with a pleasure 
such as that with which Weld, the traveller, lay 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 99 

and listened, in Canada, to the sweet laughter 
of Indian women ; for the less you understand 
of a language, the more sensible you are to the 
melody or harshness of its sounds ; for such a 
purpose, therefore, it was an advantage to me 
that I was a poor Italian scholar, reading it but 
little, and not speaking it at all, nor understand- 
ing a tenth part of what I heard spoken. 

These were my Opera pleasures ; but another 
pleasure I had which, as it could be had only 
on a Saturday night, occasionally struggled with 
my love of the Opera ; for, at that time, Tues- 
day and Saturday were the regular Opera nights. 
On this subject I am afraid I shall be rather ob- 
scure, but, I can assure the reader, not at all 
more so than Marinus in his life of Proclus, or 
many other biographers and auto-biographers of 
fair reputation. This pleasure, I have said, was 
to be had only on a Saturday night. What 
then was Saturday night to me more than any 
other night ? I had no labors that I rested 
from ; no wages to receive ; what needed I to 
care for Saturday night, more than as it was a 
summons to hear Grassini ? True, most logical 
reader; what you say is unanswerable. And 
yet so it was and is, that, whereas different men 



100 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

throw their feelings into different channels, and 
most are apt to show their interest in the con- 
cerns of the poor, chiefly by sympathy, ex- 
pressed in some shape or other, with their dis- 
tresses and sorrows, 1, at that time was disposed 
to express my interest by sympathising with their 
pleasures. The pains of poverty I had lately 
seen too much of; more than I wished to re- 
member ; but the pleasures of the poor, their 
consolations of spirit, and their reposes from 
bodily toil, can never become oppressive to con- 
template. Now Saturday night is the season 
for the chief, regular, and periodic return of rest 
to the poor ; in this point the most hostile sects 
unite, and acknowledge a common link of broth- 
erhood ; almost all Christendom rests from its 
labors. It is a rest introductory to another rest ; 
and divided by a whole day and two nights from 
the renewal of toil. On this account I feel al- 
ways, on a Saturday night, as though I also 
were released from some yoke of labor, had 
some wages to receive, and some luxury of re- 
pose to enjoy. For the sake, therefore, of wit- 
nessing, upon as large a scale as possible, a 
spectacle with which my sympathy was so en- 
tire, I used often, on Saturday nights, after I had 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 101 

taken opium, to wander forth, without much re- 
garding the direction or the distance, to all the 
markets, and other parts of London, to which 
the poor resort on a Saturday night, for laying 
out their wages. Many a family party, consist- 
ing of a man, his wife, and sometimes one or two 
of his children, have I listened to, as they stood 
consulting on their ways and means, or the 
strength of their exchequer, or the price of house- 
hold articles. Gradually I became familiar with 
their wishes, their difficulties, and their opinions. 
Sometimes there might be heard murmurs of 
discontent ; but far oftener expressions on the 
countenance, or uttered in words, of patience, 
hope, and tranquillity. And, taken generally, I 
must say, that, in this point at least, the poor 
are far more philosophic than the rich — that 
they show a more ready and cheerful submission 
to what they consider as irremediable evils, or 
irreparable losses. Whenever I saw occasion, 
or could do it without appearing to be intrusive, 
I joined their parties ; and gave my opinion up- 
on the matter in discussion, which, if not al- 
ways judicious, was always received indulgently. 
If wages were a little higher, or expected to be 
so, or the quartern loaf a little lower, or it was 



102 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

reported that onions and butter were expected 
to fall, I was glad ; yet, if the contrary were 
true, I drew from opium some means of con- 
soling myself. For opium (like the bee, that 
extracts its materials indiscriminately from roses 
and from the soot of chimneys) can overrule all 
feelings into a compliance with the master-key. 
Some of these rambles led me to great distan- 
ces ; for an opium-eater is too happy to observe 
the motion of time. And sometimes in my at- 
tempts to steer homewards, upon nautical prin- 
ciples, by fixing my eye on the pole-star, and 
seeking ambitiously for a north-west passage, in- 
stead of circumnavigating all the capes and 
head-lands I had doubled in my outward voy- 
age, I came suddenly upon such knotty problems 
of alleys, such enigmatical entries, and such 
sphynx's riddles of streets without thoroughfares, 
as must, I conceive, baffle the audacity of por- 
ters, and confound the intellects of hackney- 
coachmen. I could almost have believed, at 
times, that I must be the first discoverer of some 
of these terra incognita, and doubted, whether 
they had yet been laid down in the modern 
charts of London. For all this, however, I paid 
a heavy price in distant years, when the human 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 103 

face tyrannized over my dreams, and the per- 
plexities of my steps in London came back and 
haunted my sleep, with the feeling of perplexi- 
ties moral or intellectual, that brought confusion 
to the reason, or anguish and remorse to the 
conscience. 

Thus I have shown that opium does not, of 
necessity, produce inactivity or torpor ; but that, 
on the contrary, it often led me into markets and 
theatres. Yet, in candor, I will admit that mar- 
kets and theatres are not the appropriate haunts 
of the opium-eater, when in the divinest state 
incident to his enjoyment. In that state, crowds 
become an oppression to him ; music even, too 
sensual and gross. He naturally seeks solitude 
and silence, as indispensable conditions of those 
trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the 
crown and consummation of what opium can do 
for human nature. I, whose disease it was to 
meditate too much, and to observe too little, and 
who, upon my first entrance at college, was 
nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from 
brooding too much on the sufferings which I 
had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware 
of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all 
I could to counteract them. — I was, indeed, 



104 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

like a person who, according to the old legend, 
had entered the cave of Trophonius ; and the 
remedies I sought were to force myself into so- 
ciety, and to keep my understanding in contin- 
ual activity upon matters of science. But for 
these remedies, I should certainly have become 
hypocondriacally melancholy. In after years, 
however, when my cheerfulness was more fully 
re-established, 1 yielded to my natural inclination 
for a solitary life. And, at that time, 1 often 
fell into these reveries upon taking opium ; and 
more than once it has happened to me, on a 
summer-night, when I have been at an open 
window, in a room from which I could overlook 
the sea at a mile below me, and could command 

a view of the great town of L , at about 

the same distance, that I have sate from sunset 
to sunrise, motionless, and without wishing to 
move. 

I shall be charged with mysticism, Behmen- 
ism, quietism, &c, but that shall not alarm me. 
Sir H. Vane, the younger, was one of our 
wisest men ; and let my readers see if he, in his 
philosophical works, be half as unmystical as I 
am. — I say, then, that it has often struck me 
that the scene itself was somewhat typical of 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 105 

what took place in such a reverie. The town 

of L represented the earth, with its sorrows 

and its graves left behind, yet not out of sight, 
nor wholly forgotten. The ocean, in everlasting 
but gentle agitation, and brooded over by dove- 
like calm, might not unfitly typify the mind and 
the mood which then swayed it. For it seemed 
to me as if then first I stood at a distance, and 
aloof from the uproar of life ; as if the tumult, 
the fever, and the strife, were suspended ; a re- 
spite granted from the secret burdens of the 
heart ; a sabbath of repose ; a resting from hu- 
man labors. Here were the hopes which blos- 
som in the paths of life, reconciled with the 
peace which is in the grave ; motions of the in- 
tellect as unwearied as the heavens, yet for all 
anxieties a halcyon calm ; a tranquillity that 
seemed no product of inertia, but as if resulting 
from mighty and equal antagonisms ; infinite ac- 
tivities, infinite repose. 

Oh ! just, subtle, and mighty opium ! that to 
the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds 
that will never heal, and for " the pangs that 
tempt the spirit to rebel, " bringest an assuaging 
balm ; eloquent opium ! that with thy potent 
rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath ; 



106 CONFESSIONS, ETC. 

and to the guilty man, for one night givest back 
the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure 
from blood ; and to the proud man, a brief obliv- 
ion for 

Wrongs unredress'd, and insults unavenged ; 

that summonest to the chancery of dreams, for 
the triumphs of suffering innocence, false wit- 
nesses ; and confoundest perjury ; and dost re- 
verse the sentences of unrighteous judges : — 
thou buildest upon the bosom of darkness, out 
of the fantastic imagery of the brain, cities and 
temples, beyond the art of Phidias and Praxite- 
les — beyond the splendor of Babylon and He- 
katompylos ; and " from the anarchy of dream- 
ing sleep," callest into sunny light the faces of 
long-buried beauties, and the blessed household 
countenances, cleansed from the u dishonors of 
the grave." Thou only givest these gifts to 
man ; and thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, 
just, subtle, and mighty opium ! 



INTRODUCTION 



THE PAINS OF OPIUM 



Courteous, and, I hope, indulgent reader, 
(for all my readers must be indulgent ones, or 
else, I fear, I shall shock them too much to 
count on their courtesy,) having accompanied 
me thus far, now let me request you to move 
onwards, for about eight years ; that is to say, 
from 1804 (when I have said that my acquaint- 
ance with opium first began) to 1812. The 
years of academic life are now over and gone — 
almost forgotten : — the student's cap no longer 
presses my temples ; if my cap exist at all, it 
presses those of some youthful scholar, I trust, as 
happy as myself, and as passionate a lover of 
knowledge. My gown is, by this time, I dare to 



103 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

say, in the same condition with many thousands 
of excellent books in the Bodleian, viz., dili- 
gently perused by certain studious moths and 
worms ; or departed, however, (which is all that 
I know of its fate,) to that great reservoir of 
someivhere, to which all the tea-cups, tea-caddies, 
tea-pots, tea-kettles, &tc, have departed, (not 
to speak of still frailer vessels, such as glasses, 
decanters, bed-makers, he.,) which occasional 
resemblances in the present generation of tea- 
cups, &c, remind me of having once possessed, 
but of whose departure and final fate I, in com- 
mon with most gownsmen of either university, 
could give, I suspect, but an obscure and con- 
jectural history. The persecutions of the chap- 
el-bell, sounding its unwelcome summons to six 
o'clock matins, interrupts my slumbers no lon- 
ger ; the porter who rang it, upon whose beauti- 
ful nose (bronze, inlaid with copper) I wrote, in 
retaliation, so many Greek epigrams, whilst 1 
was dressing, is dead, and has ceased to disturb 
any body ; and I, and many others, who suf- 
fered much from his tintinnabulous propensities 
have now agreed to overlook his errors, and 
have forgiven him. Even with the bell I am 
now in charity ; it rings, I suppose, as formerly, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 109 

thrice a day ; and cruelly annoys, I doubt not, 
many worthy gentlemen, and disturbs their 
peace of mind ; but as to me, in this year 1812, 
1 regard its treacherous voice no longer, (treach- 
erous I call it, for, by some refinement of malice, 
it spoke in as sweet and silvery tones as if it 
had been inviting one to a party ;) its tones 
have no longer, indeed, power to reach me, let the 
wind sit as favorable as the malice of the bell itself 
could wish ; for I am two hundred and fifty miles 
away from it, and buried in the depth of mountains. 
And what am I doing amongst the mountains ? 
Taking opium. Yes, but what else ? Why, reader, 
in 1812, the year we are now arrived at, as well 
as for some years previous, I have been chiefly 
studying German metaphysics, in the writings 
of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, &c. And how, 
and in what manner do I live ? in short, what 
class or description of men do I belong to ? I 
am at this period, viz., in 1812, living in a cot- 
tage ; and with a single female servant, (honi 
soit qui mal y pense,) who, amongst my neigh- 
bors, passes by the name of my " house-keep- 
er." And, as a scholar and a man of learned 
education, and in that sense a gentleman, I may 
presume to class myself as an unworthy mem- 



110 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

ber of that indefinite body called gentlemen. 
Partly on the ground I have assigned, perhaps ; 
partly because, from my having no visible call- 
ing or business, it is rightly judged that I must be 
living on my private fortune ; 1 am so classed 
by my neighbors ; and, by the courtesy of mod- 
ern England, I am usually addressed on letters, 
&c, esquire, though having, I fear, in the rigor- 
ous construction of heralds, but slender preten- 
sions to that distinguished honor ; yes, in popular 
estimation, 1 am X. Y. Z., esquire, but not 
Justice of the Peace, nor Custos Rotulorum. 
Am I married ? Not yet. And I still take 
opium ? On Saturday nights. And, perhaps, 
have taken it unblushingly ever since " the rainy 
Sunday," and " the stately Pantheon," and 
" the beatific druggist " of 1804? — Even so. 
And how do I find my health after all this opium 
eating ? in short, how do I do ? Why, pretty 
well, I thank you, reader ; in the phrase of 
ladies in the straw, " as well as can be expect- 
ed." In fact, if I dared to say the real and 
simple truth, it must not be forgotten, that hitherto 
I thought to satisfy the theories of medical men, 
I ought to be ill, I was never better in my life 
than in the spring of 1812'; and I hope sin- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. HI 

cerely, that the quantity of claret, port, or 
" particular Madeira," which, in all probability, 
you, good reader, have taken, and design to 
take, for every term of eight years, during your 
natural life, may as little disorder your health as 
mine was disordered by opium I had taken for 
the eight years, between 1804 and 1812. 
Hence you may see again the danger of taking 
any medical advice from Anastasius ; in divin- 
ity, for aught I know, or law, he may be a safe 
councillor ; but not in medicine. No ; it is far 
better to consult Dr. Buchan ; as I did ; for I 
never forgot that worthy man's excellent sug- 
gestion ; and I was " particularly careful not to 
take above five-and-twenty ounces of laudanum. " 
To this moderation and temperate use of the 
article, I may ascribe it, I suppose, that as yet, 
at least, (£. e. in 1812,) I am ignorant and un- 
suspicious of the avenging terrors which opium 
has in store for those who abuse its lenity. At 
the same time, I have been only a dilettante 
eater of opium ; eight years practice even 
with the single precaution of allowing suffi- 
cient intervals between every indulgence, has 
not been sufficient to make opium necessary to 



112 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

me as an article of daily diet. But now comes 
a different era. Move on, if you please, reader, 
to 1813. In the summer of the year we have 
just quitted, I had suffered much in bodily health 
from distress of mind connected with a very mel- 
ancholy event. This event, being no ways re- 
lated to the subject now before me, further than 
through the bodily illness which it produced, I 
need not more particularly notice. Whether 
this illness of 1812 had any share in that of 
1813, I know not ; but so it was, that in the 
latter year, 1 was attacked by a most appalling 
irritation of the stomach, in all respects the same 
as that which had caused me so much suffering 
in youth, and accompanied by a revival of all 
the old dreams. This is the point of my narra- 
tive on which, as respects my own self-justifica- 
tion, the whole of what follows may be said to 
hinge. And here I find myself in a perplexing 
dilemma ; — Either, on the one hand, I must 
exhaust the reader's patience, by such a detail 
of my malady, and of my struggles with it, as 
might suffice to establish the fact of my inability 
to wrestle any longer with irritation and constant 
suffering ; or, on the other hand, by passing 
lightly over this critical part of my story, I must 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 



113 



forego the benefit of a stronger impression left on 
the mind of the reader, and must lay myself 
open to the misconstruction of having slipped by 
the easy and gradual steps of self-indulging per- 
sons, from the first to the final stage of opium- 
eating, (a misconstruction to which there will be 
a lurking predisposition in most readers, from my 
previous acknowledgments.) This is the dilem- 
ma ; the first horn of which would be sufficient 
to toss and gore any column of patient readers, 
though drawn up sixteen deep and constantly 
relieved by fresh men ; consequently that is not 
to be thought of. It remains then, that I postu- 
late so much as is necessary for my purpose. 
And let me take as full credit for what I postu- 
late as if I had demonstrated it, good reader, at 
the expense of your patience and my own. Be 
not so ungenerous as to let me suffer in your 
good opinion through my own forbearance and 
regard for your comfort. No ; believe all that 
I ask of you, viz., that I could resist no longer, 
believe it liberally, and as an act of grace ; or 
else in mere prudence ; for, if not, then in the 
next edition of my Opium Confessions revised 
and enlarged, I will make you believe, and trem- 
8 



114 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

ble ; and a force d'ennvyer, by mere dint of 
pandiculation I will terrify all readers of mine 
from ever again questioning any postulate that I 
shall think fit to make. 

This then, let me repeat, I postulate — that, 
at the time I began to take opium daily, I could 
not have done otherwise. Whether, indeed, af- 
terwards I might not have succeeded in breaking 
off the habit, even when it seemed to me that 
all efforts would be unavailing, and whether 
many of the innumerable efforts which I did 
make midit not have been carried much further, 
and my gradual re-conquests of ground lost 
might not have been followed up much more 
energetically — these are questions which I must 
decline. Perhaps I might make out a case of 
palliation ; but shall I speak ingenuously ? I 
confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that 
1 am too much of an Eudaemonist : I hanker 
too much after a state of happiness, both for 
myself and others ; I cannot face misery, 
whether my own or not, with an eye of sufficient 
firmness ; and am little capable of encountering 
present pain for the sake of any reversionary 
benefit. On some other matters, 1 can agree 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 115 

with the gentlemen in the cotton-trade* at Man- 
chester in affecting the Stoic philosophy : but 
not in this. Here I take the liberty of an 
Eclectic philosopher, and I look out for some 
courteous and considerate sect that will conde- 
scend more to the infirm condition of an opium- 
eater ; that are " sweet men;" as Chaucer says, 
a to give absolution," and will show some con- 
science in the penances they inflict, and the 
efforts of abstinence they exact, from poor sin- 
ners like myself. An inhuman moralist I can 
no more endure in my nervous state than opium 
that has not been boiled. At any rate, he, who 
summons me to send out a large freight of self- 
denial and mortification upon any cruising 
voyage of moral improvement, must make it 
clear to my understanding that the concern is a 
hopeful one. At my time of life (six and thirty 
years of age) it cannot be supposed that I have 
much energy to spare : in fact, I find it all little 

* A handsome news-room, of which I was very politely 
made free in passing through Manchester by several gen- 
tlemen of that place, is called, I think, The porch; whence 
I, who am a stranger in Manchester, inferred that the sub- 
scribers meant to profess themselves followers of Zeno. 
But I have been since assured that this is a mistake. 



116 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

enough for the intellectual labors I have on my 
hands : and, therefore, let no man expect to 
frighten me by a few hard words into embark- 
ing any part of it upon desperate adventures of 
morality. 

Whether desperate or not, however, the issue 
of the stru£2;le in 1813 was what I have men- 
tioned ; and from this date, the reader is to 
consider me as a regular and confirmed opium- 
eater, of whom to ask whether on any particular 
day he had or had not taken opium, would be 
to ask whether his lungs had performed respira- 
tion, or the heart fulfilled its functions. — You 
understand now, reader, what 1 am ; and you 
are by this time aware, that no old gentleman, 
" with a snow-white beard," will have any 
chance of persuading me to surrender " the little 
golden receptacle of the pernicious drug." No : 
I give notice to all, whether moralists or sur- 
geons, that whatever be their pretensions and 
skill in their respective lines of practice, they 
must not hope for any countenance from me, if 
they think to begin by any savage proposition 
for a Lent or Ramadan of abstinence from opium. 
This then being all fully understood between us, 
we shall in future sail before the wind. Now, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 117 

then, reader, from 1813, where all this time we 
have been sitting down and loitering — rise up, 
if you please, and walk forward about three 
years more. Now draw up the curtain, and you 
shall see me in a new character. 

If any man, poor or rich, were to say that he 
would tell us what had been the happiest day in 
his life, and the why, and the wherefore, I sup- 
pose that we should all cry out — Hear him ! 
hear him ! — As to the happiest day, that must 
be very difficult for any wise man to name : be- 
cause any event, that could occupy so distinguish- 
ed a place in a man's retrospect of his life, or 
be entitled to have shed a special felicity on 
any one day, ought to be of such an enduring 
character, as that (accidents apart) it should 
have continued to shed the same felicity, or one 
not distinguishably less, on many years together. 
To the happiest lustrum, however, or even to 
the happiest year, it may be allowed to any man 
to point without discountenance from wisdom. 
This year, in my case, reader, was the one 
which we have now reached ; though it stood, 
I confess, as a parenthesis between years of a 
gloomier character. It was a year of brilliant 
water, (to speak after the manner of jewellers,) 



118 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

set as it were, and insulated, in the gloom and 
cloudy melancholy of opium. Strange as it 
may sound, I had a little before this time de- 
scended suddenly, and without any considerable 
effort, from three hundred and twenty grains of 
opium (i. e. eight* thousand drops of laudanum) 
per day, to forty grains, or one-eighth part. In- 
stantaneously, and as if by magic, the cloud of 
profoundest melancholy which rested upon my 
brain, like some black vapors that I have seen 
roll away from the summits of mountains, drew 
off in one day ; passed off with its murky ban- 
ners as simultaneously as a ship that has been 
stranded, and is floated off by a spring tide — 

That moveth altogether, if it move at all. 

Now, then, 1 was again happy : I now took 

* I here reckon twenty-five drops of laudanum as equiv- 
alent to one grain of opium, which, I believe, is the com- 
mon estimate. However, as both may be considered va- 
riable quantities (the crude opium varying much in strength, 
and the tincture still more) I suppose that no infinitesimal 
accuracy can be had in such a calculation. Tea-spoons 
vary as much in size as opium in strength. Small ones 
hold about one hundred drops : so that eight thousand 
drops are about eighty times a tea-spoonful. The reader 
sees how much I kept within Dr. Buchan's indulgent al- 
lowance. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 119 



only one thousand drops of laudanum per day : 
and what was that ? A latter spring had come 
to close up the season of youth : my brain per- 
formed its functions as healthily as ever before : 
1 read Kant again ; and again I understood him, 
or fancied that I did. Again my feelings of 
pleasure expanded themselves to all around me : 
and if any man from Oxford or Cambridge, or 
from neither, had been announced to me in my 
unpretending cottage, I should have welcomed 
him with as sumptuous a reception as so poor a 
man could offer. Whatever else was wanting to 
a wise man's happiness, — of laudanum I would 
have given him as much as he wished, and in a 
golden cup. And, by the way, now that I 
speak of giving laudanum away, I remember, 
about this time, a little incident, which I men- 
tion, because, trifling as it was, the reader will 
soon meet it again in my dreams, which it influ- 
enced more fearfully than could be imagined. 
One day a Malay knocked at my door. What 
business a Malay could have to transact amongst 
English mountains, 1 cannot conjecture : but 
possibly he was on his road to a sea-port about 
forty miles distant. 

The servant who opened the door to him was 



120 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

a young girl born and bred amongst the moun- 
tains, who had never seen an Asiatic dress of any 
sort : his turban, therefore, confounded her not a 
little : and, as it turned out, that his attainments 
in English were exactly of the same extent as 
hers in the Malay, there seemed to be an im- 
passable gulf fixed between all communication 
of ideas, if either party had happened to possess 
any. In this dilemma, the girl recollecting the 
reputed learning of her master, (and, doubtless, 
giving me credit for a knowledge of all the lan- 
guages of the earth, besides, perhaps, a few of 
the lunar ones,) came and gave me to understand 
that there was a sort of demon below, whom she 
clearly imagined that my art could exorcise from 
the house. I did not immediately go down ; 
but, when I did. the group which presented itself, 
arranged as it was by accident, though not very 
elaborate, took hold of my fancy and my eye in 
a way that none of the statuesque attitudes ex- 
hibited in the ballets at the Opera House, though 
so ostentatiously complex, had ever done. In a 
cottage kitchen, but panelled on the wall with 
dark wood that from age and rubbing resembled 
oak, and looking more like a rustic hall of en- 
trance than a kitchen, stood the Malay — his 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 121 

turban and loose trowsers of dingy white relieved 
upon the dark panelling : he had placed himself 
nearer to the girl than she seemed to relish ; 
though her native spirit of mountain intrepidity 
contended with the feeling of simple awe which 
her countenance expressed as she gazed upon 
the tiger-cat before her. And a more striking 
picture there could not be imagined, than the 
beautiful English face of the girl, and its ex- 
quisite fairness, together with her erect and in- 
dependent attitude, contrasted with the sallow 
and bilious skin of the Malay, enamelled or 
veneered with mahogany, by marine air, his 
small, fierce, restless eyes, thin lips, slavish ges- 
tures, and adorations. Half-hidden by the fe- 
rocious looking Malay, was a little child from a 
neighboring cottage who had crept in after him, 
and was now in the act of reverting its head 
and gazing upwards at the turban and the fiery 
eyes beneath it, whilst with one hand he caught 
at the dress of the young woman for protection. 
My knowledge of the Oriental tongues is not 
remarkably extensive, being indeed confined to 
two words — the Arabic word for barley, and 
the Turkish for opium, (madjoon,) which I have 
learnt from Anastasius. And, as I had neither 



122 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

a Malay dictionary, nor even Adelung's Mith- 
ridales, which might have helped me to a few- 
words, I addressed hirn in some lines from the 
Iliad ; considering that, of such language as I 
possessed, the Greek, in point of longitude, 
came geographically nearest to an Oriental one. 
He worshipped me in a devout manner, and re- 
plied in what I suppose was Malay. In this 
way I saved my reputation with my neighbors : 
for the Malay had no means of betraying the 
secret. He lay down upon the floor for about 
an hour, and then pursued his journey. On his 
departure, I presented him with a piece of opium. 
To him as an Orientalist, I concluded that 
opium must be familiar : and the expression of 
his face convinced me that it was. Neverthe- 
less, I was struck with some little consternation 
when I saw him suddenly raise his hand to his 
mouth, and (in the schoolboy phrase) bolt the 
whole, divided into three pieces, at one mouth- 
ful. The quantity was enough to kill three 
dragoons and their horses : and I felt some alarm 
for the poor creature : but what could be done ? 
I had given him the opium in compassion for 
his solitary life, on recollecting that if he had 
travelled on foot from London, it must be nearly 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 123 

three weeks since he could have exchanged a 
thought with any human being. I could not 
think of violating the laws of hospitality, by 
having him seized and drenched with an emetic, 
and thus frightening him into a notion that we 
were going to sacrifice him to some English idol. 
No : there was clearly no help for it : — he took 
his leave : and for some days I felt anxious : but 
as I never heard of any Malay being found dead, 
I became convinced that he was used* to opium : 
and that I must have done him the service I 
designed, by giving him one night of respite 
from the pains of wandering. 

This incident I have digressed to mention, be- 

* This, however, is not a necessary conclusion : the va- 
rieties of effect produced by opium on different constitutions 
are infinite. A London Magistrate (Harriott's "Struggles 
through Life," vol. hi. p. 391, third edition,) has recorded 
that, on the first occasion of his trying laudanum for the 
gout, he took forty drops, the next night sixty, and on 
the fifth night eighty, without any effect whatever : and 
this at an advanced age. I have an anecdote from a coun- 
try surgeon, however, which sinks Mr. Harriott's case 
into a trifle ; and in my projected medical treatise on opium, 
which I will publish, provided the College of Surgeons 
will pay me for enlightening their benighted understand- 
ings upon this subject, I will relate it: but it is far too 
good a story to be published gratis. 



124 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

cause this Malay (partly from the picturesque 
exhibition he assisted to frame, partly from the 
anxiety I connected with his image for some 
days) fastened afterwards upon my dreams, and 
brought other Malays with him worse than him- 
self, that ran "a-muck"*at me, and led me 
into a world of troubles. But to quit this epi- 
sode, and to return to my intercalary year of 
happiness. I have said already, that on a sub- 
ject so important to us all as happiness, we should 
listen with pleasure to any man's experience or 
experiments, even though he were but a plough- 
boy, who cannot be supposed to have ploughed 
very deep into such an intractable soil as that of 
human pains and pleasures, or to have conducted 
his researches upon any very enlightened prin- 
ciples. But I, who have taken happiness, both 
in a solid and a liquid shape, both boiled and 
unboiled, both East India and Turkey — who 
have conducted my experiments upon this inter- 
esting subject with a sort of galvanic battery — 
and have, for the general benefit of the world, 

* See the common accounts in any Eastern traveler or 
voyager of the frantic excesses committed by Malays who 
have taken opium, or are reduced to desperation by ill luck 
at gambling. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 125 

inoculated myself, as it were, with the poison of 
eight hundred drops of laudanum per day, - — 
(just for the same reason as a French surgeon 
inoculated himself lately with a cancer — an 
English one, twenty years ago, with plague — 
and a third, I know not of what nation, with 
hydrophobia,) I (it will be admitted) must surely 
know what happiness is, if any body does. And 
therefore, I will here lay down an analysis of 
happiness ; and as the most interesting mode of 
communicating it, 1 will give it, not didactically, 
but wrapt up and involved in a picture of one 
evening, as I spent every evening during the 
intercalary year when laudanum, though taken 
daily, was to me no more than the elixir of 
pleasure. This done, I shall quit the subject of 
happiness altogether, and pass to a very different 
one — ■ the pains of opium. 

Let there be a cottage, standing in a valley, 
eighteen miles from any town — no spacious 
valley, but about two miles long, by three quar- 
ters of a mile in average width ; the benefit of 
which provision is, that all the families resident 
within its circuit will compose, as it were, one 
larger household personally familiar to your eye, 
and more or less interesting to your affections. 



126 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Let the mountains be real mountains, between 
three and four thousand feet high, and the cot- 
tage, a real cottage ; not (as a witty author has 
it) " a cottage with a double coach-house :" let 
it be, in fact, (for 1 must abide by the actual 
scene,) a white cottage, embowered with flower- 
ing shrubs, so chosen as to unfold a succession 
of flowers upon the walls, and clustering round 
the windows through all the months of spring, 
summer and autumn — beginning, in fact, with 
May roses, and ending with jasmine. Let it, 
however, not be spring, nor summer, nor au- 
tumn — but winter, in his sternest shape. This 
is a most important point in the science of hap- 
piness. And I am surprised to see people over- 
look it, and think it matter of congratulation that 
winter is going ; or, if coming, is not likely to 
be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a 
petition annually, for as much snow, hail, frost, 
or storm, of one kind or other, as the skies can pos- 
sibly afford us. Surely every body is aware of 
the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire- 
side, candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, 
tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flow- 
ing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the 
wind and rain are raging audibly without, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 127 

And at the doors and windows seem to call 
As heaven and earth they would together mell ; 
Yet the least entrance find they none at all : 
Whence sweeter grows our rest secure in massy hall. 

CASTLE OF INDOLENCE. 

All these are items in the description of a win- 
ter evening, which must surely be familiar to 
every body born in a high latitude. And it is 
evident, that most of these delicacies, like ice- 
cream, require a very low temperature of the 
atmosphere to produce them : they are fruits 
which cannot be ripened without weather stormy 
or inclement, in some way or other. I am not 
"particular ," as people say, whether it be 
snow, or black frost, or wind so strong, that (as 

Mr. says, " you may lean your back 

against it like a post." 1 can put up even with 
rain, provided that it rains cats and dogs : but 
something of the sort I must have : and, if I 
have not, I think myself in a manner ill used : 
for why am I called on to pay so heavily for 
winter, in coals, and candles, and various priva- 
tions that will occur even to gentlemen, if I am 
not to have the article good of its kind ? No : 
a Canadian winter for my money : or a Russian 
one where every man is but a co- proprietor with 



128 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

the north wind in the fee-simple of his own ears. 
Indeed, so great an epicure am I in this matter, 
that I cannot relish a winter night fully if it be 
much past St. Thomas's day, and have degen- 
erated into disgusting tendencies to vernal ap- 
pearances : no ; it must be divided by a thick 
wall of dark nights from all return of light and 
sunshine. — From the latter weeks of October 
to Christmas-eve, therefore, is the period during 
which happiness is in season, which in my judg- 
ment, enter the room with the tea-tray : for tea, 
though ridiculed by those who are naturally of 
coarse nerves, or are become so from wine-drink- 
ing, and are not susceptible of influence from so 
refined a stimulant, will always be the favorite 
beverage of the intellectual : and, for my part, 
I would have joined Dr. Johnson in a helium 
internecinum against Jonas Hanway, or any 
other impious person, who should presume to 
disparage it. — But here, to save myself the 
trouble of too much verbal description, I will 
introduce a painter ; and give him directions for 
the rest of the picture. Painters do not like 
white cottages, unless a good deal weather-stain- 
ed : but as the reader now understands that it is 
a winter night, his services will not be required 
except for the inside of the house. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 129 

Paint me, then, a room seventeen feet by 
twelve, and not more than seven and a half feet 
high. This, reader, is somewhat ambitiously styled, 
in my family, the drawing-room : but, being con- 
trived " a double debt to pay," it is also, and 
more justly, termed the library ; for it happens 
that books are the only article of property in 
which I am richer than my neighbors. Of these, 
I have about five thousand, collected gradually 
since my eighteenth year. Therefore, painter, 
put as many as you can into this room. Make 
it populous with books : and, furthermore, paint 
me a good fire ; and furniture, plain and modest, 
befitting the unpretending cottage of a scholar. 
And, near the fire, paint me a tea-table ; and 
(as it is clear that no creature can come to see 
one such a stormy night) place only two cups 
and saucers on the tea-tray ; and, if you know 
how to paint such a thing symbolically, or other- 
wise, paint me an eternal tea-pot — eternal a 
parte ante, and a parte post ; for 1 usually drink 
tea from eight o'clock at night to four in the 
morning. And, as it is very unpleasant to make 
tea, or to pour it out for oneself, paint me a 
lovely young woman, sitting at the table. Paint 
her arms like Aurora's, and her smiles like 
9 



130 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Hebe's : — But no, dear M., not even in jest 
let me insinuate that thy power to illuminate my 
cottage rests upon a tenure so perishable as mere 
personal beauty ; or that the witchcraft of an- 
gelic smiles lies within the empire of any earth- 
ly pencil. Pass, then, my good painter, to 
something more within its power : and the next 
article brought forward should naturally be my- 
self — a picture of the Opium-eater, with his 
" little golden receptacle of the pernicious drug," 
lying beside him on the table. As to the opium, 
1 have no objection to see a picture of that, 
though I would rather see the original : you 
may paint it, if you choose ; but I apprize you, 
that no " little " receptacle would, even in 1816, 
answer my purpose, who was at a distance from 
the " stately Pantheon/' and all druggists (mor- 
tal or otherwise.) No : you may as well paint 
the real receptacle, which was not of gold, but 
of glass, and as much like a wine-decanter as 
possible. Into this you may put a quart of 
ruby-colored laudanum : that, and a book of 
German metaphysics placed by its side, will 
sufficiently attest my being in the neighborhood ; 
but, as to myself, — there I demur. I admit, 
that, naturally, I ought to occupy the foreground 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 131 

of the picture ; that being the hero of the piece, 
or (if you choose) the criminal at the bar, my 
body should be had into court. This seems 
reasonable ; but why should I confess, on this 
point, to a painter ? or why confess at all ? If 
the public (into whose private ear I am confi- 
dentially whispering my confessions, and not 
into any painter's) should chance to have framed 
some agreeable picture for itself, of the Opium- 
eater's exterior, — should have ascribed. to him, 
romantically, an elegant person, or a handsome 
face, why should I barbarously tear from it so 
pleasing a delusion — pleasing both to the pub- 
lic and to me ? No : paint me, if at all, accord- 
ing to your own fancy : and, as a painter's 
fancy should teem with beautiful creations, I 
cannot fail, in that way, to be a gainer. And 
now, reader, we have run through all the ten 
categories of my condition, as it stood about 
1816 — 17 ; up to the middle of which latter 
year I judge myself to have been a happy man : 
and the elements of that happiness I have en- 
deavored to place before you, in the above 
sketch of the interior of a scholar's library ; in 
a cottage among the mountains, on a stormy 
winter evening. 



132 CONFESSIONS, ETC. 

But now farewell — a long farewell to happi- 
ness — winter or summer ! farewell to smiles 
and laughter ! farewell to peace of mind ! fare- 
well to hope and to tranquil dreams, and to the 
blessed consolations of sleep ! for more than 
three years and a half I am summoned away 
from these : I am now arrived at an Iliad of 
woes : for I have now to record 



THE PAINS OF OPIUM. 



as when some great painter dips 



His pencil in the gloom of earthquake and eclipse. 

shelly's revolt of islam. 

Reader, who have thus far accompanied me, 
I must request your attention to a brief explan- 
atory note on three points : 

1. For several reasons, I have not been able 
to compose the notes for this part of my narra- 
tive into any regular and connected shape. I 
give the notes disjointed as I find them, or have 
now drawn them up from memory. Some of 
them point to their own date ; some I have dat- 
ed ; and some are undated. Whenever it could 
answer my purpose to transplant them from the 
natural or chronological order, I have not scru- 



134 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

pled to do so. Sometimes I speak in the pre- 
sent, sometimes in the past tense. Few of the 
notes, perhaps, were written exactly at the pe- 
riod of time to which they relate ; but this can 
little affect their accuracy ; as the impressions 
were such that they can never fade from my 
mind. Much has been omitted. I could not, 
without effort, constrain myself to the task of 
either recalling, or constructing into a regular 
narrative, the whole burden of horrors which 
lies upon my brain. This feeling partly I plead 
in excuse, and partly that I am now in London, 
and am a helpless sort of person, who cannot 
even arrange his own papers without assistance ; 
and I am separated from the hands which are 
wont to perform for me the offices of an aman- 
uensis. 

2. You will think, perhaps, that I am too 
confidential and communicative of my own pri- 
vate history. It may be so. But my way of 
writing is rather to think aloud, and follow my 
own humors, than much to consider who is lis- 
tening to me ; and, if I stop to consider what is 
proper to be said to this or that person, 1 shall 
soon come to doubt whether any part at all is 
proper. The fact is, I place myself at a dis- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 135 

tance of fifteen or twenty years ahead of this 
time, and suppose myself writing to those who 
will be interested about me hereafter ; and wish- 
ing to have some record of a time, the entire 
history of which no one can know but myself, I 
do it as fully as I am able with the efforts I am 
now capable of making, because 1 know not 
whether I can ever find time to do it again. 

3. It will occur to you often to ask, why did 
I not release myself from the horrors of opium, 
by leaving it off, or diminishing it ? To this I 
must answer briefly ; it might be supposed that 
1 yielded to the fascinations of opium too easily ; 
it cannot be supposed that any man can be 
charmed by its terrors. The reader may be 
sure, therefore, that I made attempts innumera- 
ble to reduce the quantity. I add, that those 
who witnessed the agonies of those attempts, 
and not myself, were the first to beg me to 
desist. But could not 1 have reduced it a 
drop a day, or by adding water, have bisected 
or trisected a drop ? A thousand drops bisected 
would thus have taken nearly six years to 
reduce; and that they would certainly not 
have answered. But this is a common mis- 
take of those who know nothing of opium 



136 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

experimentally ; I appeal to those who do, 
whether it is not always found that down to 
a certain point it can be reduced with ease and 
even pleasure, but that, after that point, further 
reduction causes intense suffering. Yes, say 
many thoughtless persons, who know not what 
they are talking of, you will suffer a little low 
spirits and dejeciion for a few days. I answer, 
no ; there is nothing like low spirits ; on the 
contrary, the mere animal spirits are uncom- 
monly raised ; the pulse is improved ; the health 
is better. It is not there that the suffering lies. 
It has no resemblance to the sufferings caused by 
renouncing wine. It is a state of unutterable 
irritation of stomach (which surely is not much 
like dejection,) accompanied by intense perspi- 
rations, and feelings such as I shall not attempt 
to describe without more space at my com- 
mand. 

I shall now enter " in medias res" and shall 
anticipate, from a time when my opium pains 
might be said to be at their acme, an account of 
their palsying effects on the intellectual facul- 
ties. 

My studies have now been long interrupted. 
I cannot read to myself with any pleasure, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 137 

hardly with a moment's endurance. Yet I read 
aloud sometimes for the pleasure of others ; be- 
cause reading is an accomplishment of mine ; and, 
in the slang use of the word accomplishment as a 
superficial and ornamental attainment, almost the 
only one 1 possess : and formerly, if I had any 
vanity at all connected with any endowment or 
attainment of mine, it was with this ; for I had 
observed that no accomplishment was so rare. 

Players are the worst readers of all : reads 

vilely : and Mrs. , who is so celebrated, 

can read nothing well but dramatic compositions : 
Milton she cannot read sufTerably. People in 
general either read poetry without any passion 
at all, or else overstep the modesty of nature, 
and read not like scholars. Of late if I have 
felt moved by any thing in books, it has been 
by the grand lamentations of Sampson Agon- 
istes, or the great harmonies of the Satanic 
speeches in Paradise Regained, when read aloud 
by myself. A young lady sometimes comes 
and drinks tea with us : at her request and M.'s 

I now and then read W 's poems to them. 

(W., by-the-by, is the only poet I ever met who 
could read his own verses : often indeed he reads 
admirably.) 



138 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

For nearly two years I believe that I read no 
book but one : and I owe it to the author, in 
discharge of a great debt of gratitude, to men- 
tion what that was. The sublimer and more 
passionate poets I still read, as 1 have said, by 
snatches, and occasionally. But my proper 
vocation, as 1 well knew, was the exercise of 
the analytic understanding. Now, for the most 
part, analytic studies are continuous, and not to 
be pursued by fits and starts, or fragmentary 
efforts. Mathematics, for instance, intellectual 
philosophy, &c, were all become insupportable 
to me ; I shrunk from them with a sense of 
powerless and infantine feebleness that gave me 
an anguish the greater from remembering the 
time when I grappled with them to my own 
hourly delight ; and for this further reason, be- 
cause I had devoted the labor of my whole life, 
and had dedicated my intellect, blossoms and 
fruits, to the slow and elaborate toil of con- 
structing one single work, to which I had pre* 
sumed to give the title of an unfinished work of 
Spinosa's, viz. De emendatione humani intellec- 
ts. This was now lying locked up, as by frost, 
like any Spanish bridge or aqueduct, begun 
upon too great a scale for the resources of the 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATEE. 139 

architect ; and, instead of surviving me as a 
monument of wishes at least, and aspirations, 
and a life of labor dedicated to the exaltation of 
human nature in that way in which God had 
best fitted me to promote so great an object, it 
was likely to stand a memorial to my children 
of hopes defeated, of baffled efforts, of materials 
uselessly accumulated, of foundations laid that 
were never to support a superstructure, — of 
the grief and the ruin of the architect. In this 
state of imbecility, I had, for amusement, turned 
my attention to political economy ; my under- 
standing, which formerly had been as active and 
restless as a hyena, could not, I suppose, (so 
long as I lived at all) sink into utter lethargy ; 
and political economy offers this advantage to a 
person in my state, that though it is eminently 
an organic science, (no part, that is to say, but 
what acts on the whole, as the whole again 
reacts on each part,) yet the several parts may 
be detached and contemplated singly. Great 
as was the prostration of my powers at this time, 
yet I could not forget my knowledge ; and my 
understanding had been for too many years in- 
timate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the 
great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of 



140 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



the utter feebleness of the main herd of modern 
economists. I had been led in 1811 to look 
into loads of books and pamphlets on many- 
branches of economy ; and, at my desire, M. 
sometimes read to me chapters from more recent 
works, or parts of parliamentary debates. I saw 
that these were generally the very dregs and 
rinsings of the human intellect ; and that any 
man of sound head, and practised in wielding 
logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up 
the whole academy of modern economists, and 
throttle them between heaven and earth with 
his finger and thumb, or bray their fungous heads 
to powder with a lady's fan. At length, in 
1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me down Mr. 
Ricardo's book : and recurring to my own pro- 
phetic anticipation of the advent of some 
legislator for this science, I said, before 1 had 
finished the first chapter, " Thou art the man !" 
Wonder and curiosity were emotions that had 
long been dead in me. Yet 1 wondered once 
more : I wondered at myself that I could once 
again be stimulated to the effort of reading: and 
much more I wondered at the book. Had this 
profound work been really written in England 
during the nineteenth century ? Was it pos- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 141 

sible ? I supposed thinking* had been extinct 
in England. Could it be that an Englishman, 
and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed 
by mercantile and senatorial cares, had accom- 
plished what all the universities of Europe, and 
a century of thought, had failed even to advance 
by one hair's breadth ? All other writers had 
been crushed and overlaid by the enormous 
weights of facts and documents ; Mr. Ricardo 
had deduced, a priori, from the understanding 
itself, laws which first gave a ray of light into 
the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had con- 
structed what had been but a collection of 
tentative discussions into a science of regular 
proportions, now first standing on an eternal 
basis. 

Thus did one simple work of a profound un- 
derstanding avail to give me a pleasure and an 

* The reader must remember what I here mean by 
thinking; because, else this would be a very presump- 
tuous expression. England, of late, has been rich to ex- 
cess in fine thinkers, in the departments of creative and 
combining thought ; but there is a sad dearth of masculine 
thinkers in any analytic path. A Scotchman of eminent 
name has lately told us, that he is obliged to quit even 
mathematics, for want of encouragement. 



142 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

activity which I had not known for years : — it 
roused me even to write, or, at least, to dictate 
what M. wrote for me. It seemed to me, that 
some important truths had escaped even " the 
inevitable eye " of Mr. Ricardo : and, as these 
were, for the most part, of such a nature that 1 
could express or illustrate them more briefly and 
elegantly by algebraic symbols than in the usual 
clumsy and loitering diction of economists, the 
whole would not have filled a pocket-book ; 
and being so brief, with M. for my amanuensis, 
even at this time, incapable as I was of all gen- 
eral exertion, I drew up my Prolegomena to all 
future Systems of Political Economy. I hope 
it will not be found redolent of opium ; though, 
indeed, to most people, the subject itself is a 
sufficient opiate. 

This exertion, however, was but a temporary 
flash ; as the sequel showed — for I designed to 
publish my work ; arrangements were made at a 
provincial press, about eighteen miles distant, for 
printing it. An additional compositor was re- 
tained, for some days, on this account. The 
work was even twice advertised : and I was, in 
a manner, pledged to the fulfilment of my in- 
tention. But I had a preface to write ; and a 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 143 

dedication, which I wished to make a splendid 
one to Mr. Ricardo. I found myself quite 
unable to accomplish all this. The arrange- 
ments were countermanded : the compositor dis- 
missed : and my " prolegomena " rested peace- 
fully by the side of its elder and more dignified 
brother. 

I have thus described and illustrated my in- 
tellectual torpor, in terms that apply, more or 
less, to every part of the four years during which 
I was under the Circean spells of opium. But 
for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be 
said to have existed in a dormant state. I sel- 
dom could prevail on myself to write a letter ; 
an answer of a few words, to any that I received 
was the utmost that I could accomplish ; and 
often that not until the letter had lain weeks, or 
even months, on my writing table. Without 
the aid of M. all records of bills paid, or to be 
paid, must have perished : and my whole do- 
mestic economy, whatever became of Political 
Economy, must have gone into irretrievable 
confusion. I shall not afterwards allude to this 
part of the case : it is one, however, which the 
opium-eater will find, in the end, as oppressive 
and tormenting as any other, from the sense of 



144 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

incapacity and feebleness, from the direct em- 
barrassments incident to the neglect or procras- 
tination of each day's appropriate duties, and 
from the remorse which must often exasperate 
the stings of these evils to a reflective and con- 
scientious mind. The opium-eater loses none 
of his moral sensibilities, or aspirations : he 
wishes and longs, as earnestly as ever, to realize 
what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted 
by duty ; but his intellectual apprehension of 
what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not 
of execution only, but even of power to attempt. 
He lies under the weight of incubus and night- 
mare : he lies in sight of all that he would fain 
perform, just as a man forcibly confined to his 
bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, 
who is compelled to witness injury or outrage 
offered to some object of his tenderest love : — 
he curses the spells which chain him down from 
motion : — he would lay down his life if he 
might but get up and walk ; but he is power- 
less as an infant, and cannot even attempt to 
rise. 

I now pass to what is the main subject of 
these latter confessions, to the history and journal 
of what took place in my dreams ; for these 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 145 

were the immediate and proximate cause of my 

acutest suffering. 

. \ 

The first notice 1 had of any important change 

going on in this part of my physical economy, 
was from the reawaking of a state of eye gen- 
erally incident to childhood, or exalted states of 
irritability. I know not whether my reader is 
aware that many children, perhaps most, have 
a power of painting, as it were, upon the dark- 
ness, all sorts of phantoms ; in some that power 
is simply a mechanic affection of the eye ; others 
have a voluntary, or semi-voluntary power to 
dismiss or to summon them ; or, as a child once 
said to me when I questioned him on this matter, 
" I can tell them to go, and they go ; but some- 
times they come when I don't tell them to come." 
Whereupon I told him that he had almost as 
unlimited a command over apparitions, as a 
Roman centurion over his soldiers. In the mid- 
dle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty 
became positively distressing to me : at night, 
when I lay awake in bed, vast processions 
passed along in mournful pomp ; friezes of 
never-ending stories, that to my feelings were 
as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn 
from times before (Edipus or Priam, before 
10 



146 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Tyre, before Memphis. And, at the same time, 
a corresponding change took place in my dreams ; 
a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted 
up within my brain, which presented nightly 
spectacles of more than earthly splendor. And 
the four following facts may be mentioned, as 
noticeable at this time : — 

I. That, as the creative state of the eye in- 
creased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the 
waking and the dreaming states of the brain in 
one point — that whatsoever I happened to 
call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the 
darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my 
dreams ; so that I feared to exercise this faculty ; 
for, as Midas turned all things to gold, that yet 
baffled his hopes and defrauded his human de- 
sires, so whatsoever things capable of being 
visually represented I did but think of in the 
darkness, immediately shaped themselves into 
phantoms of the eye ; and, by a process appar- 
ently no less inevitable, when thus once traced 
in faint and visionary colors, like writings in sym- 
pathetic ink, they were drawn out by the fierce 
chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable splen- 
dor that fretted my heart. 

II. For this, and all other changes in my 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 147 

dreams, were accompanied by deep-seated 
anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are 
wholly incommunicable by words. I seemed 
every night to descend, not metaphorically, but 
literally to descend, into chasms and sunless 
abysses, depths below depths, from which it 
seemed hopeless that I could ever reascend. 
Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had reascend- 
ed. This I do not dwell upon : because the 
state of gloom which attended these gorgeous 
spectacles, amounting at least to utter darkness, 
as of some suicidal despondency, cannot be 
approached by words. 

III. The sense of space, and in the end, the 
sense of time, were both powerfully affected. 
Buildings, landscapes, &c, were exhibited in 
proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted 
to receive. Space swelled, and was amplified 
to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, 
however, did not disturb me so much as the 
vast expansion of time ; I sometimes seemed to 
have lived for seventy or one hundred years in 
one night ; nay, sometimes had feelings repre- 
sentative of a millennium passed in that time, or, 
however, of a duration far beyond the limits of 
any human experience. 



148 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

IV. The minutest incidents of childhood, or 
forgotten scenes of later years, were often re- 
vived : I could not be said to recollect them ; 
for if I had been told of them when waking, I 
should not have been able to acknowledge them 
as parts of my past experience. But placed as 
they were before me, in dreams like intuitions, 
ancT clothed in all their evanescent circumstan- 
ces and accompanying feelings, I recognised 
them instantaneously. I was once told by a 
near relative of mine, that having in her child- 
hood fallen into a river, and being on the very 
verge of death but for the critical assistance 
which reached her, she saw in a moment her 
whole life, in its minutest incidents, arrayed be- 
fore her simultaneously as in a mirror ; and she 
had a faculty developed as suddenly for com- 
prehending the whole and every part, This, 
from some opium experiences of mine, I can 
believe ; I have, indeed, seen the same thing 
asserted twice in modern books, and accompa- 
nied by a remark which 1 am convinced is true ; 
viz. that the dread book of account, which the 
scriptures speak of, is, in fact, the mind itself of 
each individual. Of this, at least, I feel assured, 
that there is no such thing as forgetting possible 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 149 

to the mind ; a thousand accidents may, and 
will interpose a veil between our present con- 
sciousness and the secret inscriptions on the 
mind ; accidents of the same sort will also rend 
away this veil ; but alike, whether veiled or un- 
veiled, the inscription remains for ever ; just as 
the stars seem to withdraw before the common 
light of day, whereas in fact we all know that 
it is the light which is drawn over them as a 
veil — and that they are waiting to be revealed, 
when the obscuring daylight shall have with- 
drawn. 

Having noticed these four facts as memorably 
distinguishing my dreams from those of health, I 
shall now cite a case illustrative of the first fact ; 
and shall then cite any others that I remember, 
either in their chronological order, or any other 
that may give them more effect as pictures to 
the reader. 

I had been in youth, and even since, for occa- 
sional amusement, a great reader of Livy, whom, 
1 confess, that I prefer, both for style and mat- 
ter, to any other of the Roman historians ; and 
I had often felt as most solemn and appalling 
sounds, and most emphatically representative of 
the majesty of the Roman people, the two 



150 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

words so often occurring in Livy — Consul 
Romanus ; especially when the consul is intro- 
duced in his military character, I mean to say, 
that the words king, sultan, regent, he, or any 
other titles of those who embody in their own 
persons the collective majesty of a great people, 
had less power over my reverential feelings. I 
had also, though no great reader of history, made 
myself minutely and critically familiar with one 
period of English history, viz., the period of the 
Parliamentary War, having been attracted by the 
moral grandeur of some who figured in that day, 
and by the many interesting memoirs which sur- 
vive those unquiet times. Both these parts of 
my lighter reading, having furnished me often 
with matter of reflection, now furnished me with 
matter for my dreams. Often I used to see, after 
painting upon the blank darkness, a sort of re- 
hearsal whilst waking, a crowd of ladies, and 
perhaps a festival, and dances. And I heard it 
said, or I said to myself, " these are English ladies 
from the unhappy times of Charles I. These 
are the wives and daughters of those who met 
in peace, and sate at the same tables, and were 
allied by marriage or by blood ; and yet, after a 
certain day in August, 1642, never smiled upon 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 151 

each other again, nor met but in the field of 
battle ; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or 
at Naseby, cut asunder all ties of love by the 
cruel sabre, and washed away in blood the 
memory of ancient friendship." — The ladies 
danced, and looked as lovely as the court of 
George IV. Yet I knew, even in my dream, 
that they had been in the grave for nearly two 
centuries. This pageant would suddenly dis- 
solve : and, at a clapping of hands, would be 
heard the heart-quaking sound of Consul Ro- 
manics : and immediately came " sweeping by," 
in gorgeous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt 
round by a company of centurions, with the 
crimson tunic hoisted on a spear, and followed 
by the alalagmos of the Roman legions. 

Many years ago, when I was looking over 
Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, 
who was standing by, described to me a set of 
plates by that artist, called his Dreams, and 
which record the scenery of his own visions 
during the delirium of a fever. Some of them 
(1 describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's 
account) represented vast gothic balls : on the 
floor of which stood all sorts of engines and 
machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, cata- 



152 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

pults, &c. &c, expressive of enormous power 
put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping 
along the sides of the walls, you perceived a 
staircase ; and upon it, groping his way upwards, 
was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little 
further, and you perceive it come to a sudden 
abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and 
allowing no step onwards to him who had reach- 
ed the extremity, except into the depths below. 
Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you 
suppose, at least, that his labors must in some 
way terminate here. But raise your eyes, and 
behold a second flight of stairs still higher : on 
which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time 
standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again 
elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of 
stairs is beheld : and again is poor Piranesi busy 
on his aspiring labors : and so on, until the un- 
finished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the 
upper gloom of the hall. — With the same 
power of endless growth and self-reproduction 
did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the 
early stage of my malady, the splendors of my 
dreams were indeed chiefly architectural : and I 
beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was 
never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 153 

the clouds. From a great modern poet I cite 
part of a passage which describes, as an appear- 
ance actually beheld in the clouds, what in 
many of its circumstances I saw frequently in 
sleep : — 

The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, 
Was of a mighty city — boldly say 
A wilderness of building, sinking far 
And self-withdrawn into a wondrous depth, 
Far sinking into splendor — without end! 
Fabric it seemed of diamond, and of gold, 
With alabaster domes and silver spires, 
And blazing terrace upon terrace, high 
Uplifted ; here, serene pavilions bright, 
In avenues disposed ; their towers begirt 
With battlements that on their restless fronts 
Bore stars — illumination of all gems! 
By earthly nature had the effect been wrought 
Upon the dark materials of the storm 
Now pacified ; on them, and on the coves, 
And mountain-steeps and summits, whereunto 
The vapors had receded — taking there 
Their station under a cerulean sky, &c. &c. 

The sublime circumstance, — " battlements 
that on their restless fronts bore stars," — might 
have been copied from my architectural dreams, for 
it often occurred. — We hear it reported of Dry- 
den, and of Fuseli in modern times, that they 



154 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

thought proper to eat raw meat for the sake of 
obtaining splendid dreams : how much better for 
such a purpose to have eaten opium, which yet I 
do not remember that any poet is recorded to have 
done, except the dramatist Shadwell : and in 
ancient days, Homer is, I think, rightly reputed 
to have known the virtues of opium. 

To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes 
— and silvery expanses of water: — these 
haunted me so much, that I feared (though 
possibly it will appear ludicrous to a medical 
man) that some dropsical state or tendency of 
the brain might thus be making itself (to use a 
metaphysical word) objective ; and the sentient 
organ project itself as its own object. For two 
months I suffered greatly in my head, — a part 
of my bodily structure which had hitherto been 
so clear from all touch or taint of weakness 
(physically, I mean) that I used to say of it, as 
the last Lord Orford said of his stomach, that 
it seemed likely to survive the rest of my per- 
son. — Till now I had never felt a headache 
even, or any the slightest pain, except rheu- 
matic pains caused by my own folly. How- 
ever, I got over this attack, though it must have 
been verging on something very dangerous. 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 155 

The waters now changed their character, — 
from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they 
now became seas and oceans. And now came 
a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself 
slowly like a scroll, through many months, prom- 
ised an abiding torment ; and, in fact, it never 
left me until the winding up of my case. Hith- 
erto the human face had mixed often in my 
dreams, but not despotically , nor with any special 
power of tormenting. But now that which I 
have called the tyranny of the human face began 
to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my Lon- 
don life might be answerable for this. Be that 
as it may, now it was that upon the rocking 
waters of the ocean the human face began to 
appear ; the sea appeared paved with innumera- 
ble faces, upturned to the heavens : faces, im- 
ploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by 
thousands, by myriads, by generations, by cen- 
turies : — my agitation was infinite, — my mind 
tossed — and surged with the ocean. 

May, 1818. — The Malay had been a fearful 
enemy for months. I have been every night, 
through his means, transported into Asiatic 
scenes. I know not whether others share in 
my feelings on this point ; but 1 have often 



156 



CONFESSIONS OF AN 



thought that if I were compelled to forego 
England, and to live in China, and among Chi- 
nese manners and modes of life and scenery, I 
should go mad. The causes of my horror lie 
deep ; and some of them must be common to 
others. Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of 
awful images and associations. As the cradle 
of the human race, it would alone have a dim 
and reverential feeling connected with it. But 
there are other reasons. No man can pretend 
that the wild, barbarous, and capricious super- 
stitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, 
affect him in the way that he is affected by the 
ancient, monumental, cruel, and elaborate reli- 
gions of Indostan, &c. The mere antiquity of 
Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, 
modes of faith, &c, is so impressive, that to me 
the vast age of the race and name overpowers 
the sense of youth in the individual. A young 
Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man re- 
newed. Even Englishmen, though not bred in 
any knowledge of such institutions, cannot but 
shudder at the mystic sublimity of castes that 
have flowed apart, and refused to mix, through 
such immemorial tracts of time ; nor can any 
man fail to be awed by the names of the Ganges, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 157 

or the Euphrates. It contributes much to these 
feelings, that southern Asia is, and has been for 
thousands of years, the part of the earth most 
swarming with human life : the great officina 
gentium. Man is a weed in those regions. The 
vast empires also, into which the enormous pop- 
ulation of Asia has always been cast, give a 
further sublimity to the feelings associated with 
all oriental names or images. In China, over 
and above what it has in common with the rest 
of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of 
life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter ab- 
horrence, and want of sympathy, placed be- 
tween us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. 
I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute ani- 
mals. All this, and much more than I can say, 
or have time to say, the reader must enter into, 
before he can comprehend the unimaginable 
horror which these dreams of oriental imagery, 
and mythological tortures, impressed upon me. 
Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat 
and vertical sun-lights, I brought together all 
creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and 
plants, usages and appearances, that are found 
in all tropical regions, and assembled them to- 
gether in China or Indostan. From kindred 



158 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

feelings, 1 soon brought Egypt and all her gods 
under the same law. I was stared at, hooted at, 
grinned at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paro- 
quets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas : and 
was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in 
secret rooms ; I was the idol ; I was the priest ; 
I was worshipped ; I was sacrificed. I fled from 
the wrath of Brama through all the forests of 
Asia : Vishnu hated me : Seeva laid wait for 
me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris : 1 
had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and 
the crocodile trembled at. I was buried, for a 
thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies 
and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart 
of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with can- 
cerous kisses, by crocodiles ; and laid, confound- 
ed with all unutterable slimy things, amongst 
reeds and Nilotic mud. 

I thus give the reader some slight abstraction 
of my oriental dreams, which always filled me 
with such amazement at the monstrous scenery, 
that horror seemed absorbed, for a while, in sheer 
astonishment. Sooner or later, came a reflux of 
feeling that swallowed up the astonishment, and 
left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and 
abomination of what I saw. Over every form, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 159 

and threat, and punishment, and dim sightless 
incarceration, brooded a sense of eternity and 
infinity that drove me into an oppression as of 
madness. Into these dreams only, it was, with 
one or two slight exceptions, that any circum- 
stances of physical horror entered. All before 
had been moral and spiritual terrors. But here 
the main agents were ugly birds, or snakes, or 
crocodiles ; especially the last. The cursed 
crocodile became to me the object of more hor- 
ror than almost all the rest. I was compelled to 
live with him ; and (as was always the case 
almost in my dreams) for centuries. I escaped 
sometimes, and found myself in Chinese houses 
with cane tables, &c. All the feet of the ta- 
bles, sofas, &c, soon became instinct with 
life : the abominable head of the crocodile, and 
his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied 
into a thousand repetitions : and I stood loathing 
and fascinated. And so often did this hideous 
reptile haunt my dreams, that many times the 
very same dream was broken up in the very 
same way : I heard gentle voices speaking to 
me, (I hear every thing when I am sleeping,) 
and instantly I awoke : it was broad noon ; and 
my children were standing, hand in hand, at my 



160 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

bedside ; come to show me their colored shoes, 
or new frocks, or to let me see them dressed for 
going out. I protest that so awful was the 
transition from the damned crocodile, and the 
other unutterable monsters and abortions of my 
dreams, to the sight of innocent human natures 
and of infancy, that, in the mighty and sudden 
revulsion of mind, I wept, and could not forbear 
it, as I kissed their faces. 

June, 1819. — I have had occasion to re- 
mark, at various periods of my life, that the 
deaths of those whom we love, and indeed the 
contemplation of death generally, is (ceteris 
paribus) more affecting in summer than in any 
other season of the year. And the reasons are 
these three, I think : first, that the visible 
heavens in summer appear far higher, more dis- 
tant, and (if such a solecism may be excused) 
more infinite ; the clouds by which chiefly the 
eye expounds the distance of the blue pavilion 
stretched over our heads, are in summer more 
voluminous, massed, and accumulated in far 
grander and more towering piles : secondly, the 
light and the appearances of the declining and 
the setting sun are much more fitted to be types 
and characters of the infinite : and, thirdly, 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 161 

(which is the main reason) the exuberant and 
riotous prodigality of life naturally forces the 
mind more powerfully upon the antagonist 
thought of death, and the wintry sterility of the 
grave. For it may be observed, generally, that 
wherever two thoughts stand related to each 
other by a law of antagonism, and exist, as it 
were, by mutual repulsion, they are apt to sug- 
gest each other. On these accounts it is that I 
find it impossible to banish the thought of death 
when I am walking alone in the endless days of 
summer ; and any particular death, if not more 
affecting, at least haunts my mind more obsti- 
nately and besiegingly in that season. Perhaps 
this cause, and a slight incident which I omit, 
might have been the immediate occasions of the 
following dream ; to which, however, a predis- 
position must always have existed in my mind ; 
but having been once roused, it never left me, 
and split into a thousand fantastic varieties, 
which often suddenly reunited, and composed 
again the original dream. 

I thought that it was a Sunday morning in 

May, that it was Easter Sunday, and as yet 

very early in the morning. I was standing, as 

it seemed to me, at the door of my own cottage. 

11 



162 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

Right before me lay the very scene which could 
really be commanded from that situation, but 
exalted, as was usual, and solemnized by the 
power of dreams. There were the same moun- 
tains, and the same lovely valley at their feet ; 
but the mountains were raised to more than Al- 
pine height, and there was interspace far larger 
between them of meadows and forest lawns ; the 
hedges were rich with white roses ; and no living 
creature was to be seen, excepting that in the 
green church-yard there were cattle tranquilly 
reposing upon the verdant graves, and particu- 
larly round about the grave of a child whom I 
had tenderly loved, just as I had really beheld 
them, a little before sunrise in the same summer, 
when that child died. I gazed upon the well- 
known scene, and I said aloud (as I thought) to 
myself, " It yet wants much of sunrise ; and it 
is Easter Sunday ; and that is the day on which 
they celebrate the first firuits of resurrection. I 
will walk abroad ; old griefs shall be forgotten 
to-day ; for the air is cool and still, and the hills 
are high, and stretch away to Heaven ; and the 
forest-glades are as quiet as the church-yard ; 
and, with the dew, I can wash the fever from 
my forehead, and then I shall be unhappy no 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 163 

longer." And I turned, as if to open my gar- 
den gate ; and immediately I saw upon the left 
a scene far different ; but which yet the power 
of dreams had reconciled into harmony with the 
other. The scene was an oriental one ; and 
there also it was Easter Sunday, and very early 
in the morning. And at a vast distance were 
visible, as a stain upon the horizon, the domes 
and cupulos of a great city — an image or faint 
abstraction, caught perhaps in childhood from 
some picture of Jerusalem. And not a bow- 
shot from me, upon a stone, and shaded by Ju- 
dean palms, there sat a woman ; and I looked ; 
and it was — Ann ! She fixed her eyes upon 
me earnestly ; and I said to her at length : " So 
then I have found you at last." I waited ; but 
she answered me not a word. Her face was the 
same as when I saw it last, and yet again how 
different ! Seventeen years ago, when the lamp- 
light fell upon her face, as for the last time I 
kissed her lips (lips, Ann, that to me were not 
polluted,) her eyes were streaming with tears : 
her tears were now wiped away ; she seemed 
more beautiful than she was at that time, but in 
all other points the same, and not older. Her 
looks were tranquil, but with unusual solemnity 



164 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

of expression ; and I now gazed upon her with 
some awe, but suddenly her countenance grew 
dim, and, turning to the mountains, I perceived 
vapors rolling between us ; in a moment, all had 
vanished ; thick darkness came on ; and, in the 
twinkling of an eye, I was far away from moun- 
tains, and by lamp-light in Ox ford -street, walk- 
ing again with Ann — just as we walked seven- 
teen years before, when we were both children. 

As a final specimen, 1 cite one of a different 
character, from 1820. 

The dream commenced with a music which 
now I often heard in dreams — a music of prep- 
aration and of awakening suspense ; a music 
like the opening of the Coronation Anthem, and 
which, like that, gave the feeling of a vast 
march — of infinite cavalcades filing off — and 
the tread of innumerable armies. The morning 
was come of a mighty day — a day of crisis and of 
final hope for human nature, then suffering some 
mysterious eclipse, and laboring in some dread 
extremity. Somewhere, I knew not where — 
somehow, I knew not how — by some beings, I 
knew not whom — a battle, a strife, an agony, 
was conducting, — was evolving like a great 
drama, or piece of music ; with which my sym- 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 165 

\ 

pathy was the more insupportable from my con- 
fusion as to its place, its cause, its nature, and 
its possible issue. I, as is usual in dreams 
(where, of necessity, we make ourselves central 
to every movement,) had the power, and yet 
had not the power, to decide it. I had the 
power, if I could raise myself, to will it ; and yet 
again had not the power, for the weight of twen- 
ty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of 
inexpiable guilt. " Deeper than ever plummet 
sounded," I lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, 
the passion deepened. Some greater interest 
was at stake ; some mightier cause than ever 
yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had pro- 
claimed. Then came sudden alarms ; hurry ings 
to and fro : trepidations of innumerable fugitives, 
I knew not whether from the good cause or the 
bad : darkness and lights : tempest and human 
faces : and at last, with the sense that all was 
lost, female forms, and the features that were 
worth all the world to me, and but a moment 
allowed, — and clasped hands, and heart break- 
ing partings, and then - — everlasting farewells ! 
and, with a sigh, such as the caves of hell sighed 
when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred 
name of death, the sound was reverberated — 



166 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

everlasting farewells ! and again, and yet again 
reverberated — everlasting farewells ! 

And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud — 
" I will sleep no more !" 

But I am now called upon to wind up a nar- 
rative which has already extended to an un- 
reasonable length. Within more spacious limits, 
the materials which I have used might have 
been better unfolded ; and much which I have 
not used might have been added with effect. 
Perhaps, however, enough has been given. It 
now remains that I should say something of the 
way in which this conflict of horrors was finally 
brought to its crisis. The reader is already 
aware, (from a passage near the beginning of 
the introduction to the first part) that the opium- 
eater has, in some way or other, " unwound, al- 
most to its final links, the accursed chain which 
bound him." By what means ? To have nar- 
rated this, according to the original intention, 
would have far exceeded the space which can 
now be allowed. It is fortunate, as such a co- 
gent reason exists for abridging it, that I should, 
on a maturer view of the case, have been ex- 
ceedingly unwilling to injure, by any such unaf- 
fecting details, the impression of the history 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 167 

itself, as an appeal to the prudence and the con- 
science of the yet unconfirmed opium-eater — 
or even (though a very inferior consideration) 
to injure its effect as a composition. The in- 
terest of the judicious reader will not attach it- 
self chiefly to the subject of the fascinating spells, 
but to the fascinating power. Not the opium- 
eater, but the opium is the true hero of the tale ; 
and the legitimate centre on which the interest 
revolves. The object was to display the mar- 
vellous agency of opium, whether for pleasure 
or for pain : if that is done, the action of the 
piece has closed. 

However, as some people, in spite of all laws 
to the contrary, will persist in asking what be- 
came of the opium-eater, and in what state he 
now is, 1 answer for him thus : The reader is 
aware that opium had long ceased to found 
its empire on spells of pleasure ; it was solely 
by the tortures connected with the attempt to 
abjure it, that it kept its hold. Yet, as other 
tortures, no less it may be thought, attended the 
non-abjuration of such a tyrant, a choice only 
of evils was left ; and that might as well have 
been adopted, which, however terrific in itself, 
held out a prospect of final restoration to happi- 
ness. This appears true ; but good logic gave 



168 CONFESSIONS OF AN 

the author no strength to act upon it. How- 
ever, a crisis arrived for the author's life, and a 
crisis for other objects still dearer to him — and 
which will always be far dearer to him than his 
life, even now that it is again a happy one. I 
saw that I must die if I continued the opium : I 
determined, therefore, if that should be required, 
to die in throwing it off. How much I was at 
that time taking I [cannot say ; for the opium 
which I used had been purchased for me by a 
friend, who afterwards refused to let me pay 
him ; so that I could not ascertain even what 
quantity I had used within the year. I appre- 
hend, however, that I took it very irregularly : 
and that I varied from about fifty or sixty grains., 
to one hundred and fifty a-day. My first task 
was to reduce it to forty, to thirty, and as fast as 
I could, to twelve grains. 

I triumphed ; but think not, reader, that 
therefore my sufferings were ended ; nor think 
of me as of one sitting in a dejected state. Think 
of me as of one, even when four months had 
passed, still agitated, writhing, throbbing, palpi- 
tating, shattered ; and much, perhaps, in the 
situation of him who has been racked, as I col- 
lect the torments of that state from the affecting 



ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. 169 

account of them left by the most innocent sufferer* 
(of the times of James 1.) Meantime, I derived 
no benefit from any medicine, except one pre- 
scribed to me by an Edinburgh surgeon of great 
eminence, viz. ammoniated tincture of Valerian. 
Medical account, therefore, of my emancipation 
I have not much to give : and even that little, 
as managed by a man so ignorant of medicine 
as myself, would probably tend only to mislead. 
At all events, it would be misplaced in this situ- 
ation. The moral of the narrative is addressed 
to the opium-eater ; and, therefore, of necessity, 
limited in its application. If he is taught to fear 
and tremble, enough has been effected. But 
he may say, that the issue of my case is at least 
a proof that opium, after a seventeen years' use, 
and an eight years' abuse of its powers, may still 
be renounced ; and that he may chance to bring 
to the task greater energy than I did, or that 
with a stronger constitution than mine he may 
obtain the same results with less. This may be 
true ; I would not presume to measure the ef- 
forts of other men by my own ; I heartily wish 
him more energy ; I wish him the same success. 

* William Lithgow : his book (Travels, &c.) is ill and 
pedantically written ; but the account of his own suffer- 
ings on the rack at Malaga is overpoweringly affecting. 



170 CONFESSIONS, ETC. 

Nevertheless, I had motives external to myself 
which he may unfortunately want ; and these 
supplied me with conscientious supports which 
mere personal interests might fail to supply to a 
mind debilitated by opium. 

Jeremy Taylor conjectures that it may be as 
painful to be born as to die : I think it probable : 
and, during the whole period of diminishing the 
opium, I had the torments of a man passing out 
of one mode of existence into another. The 
issue was not death, but a sort of physical re- 
generation : and I may add, that ever since, at 
intervals, I have had a restoration of more than 
youthful spirits, though under the pressure of dif- 
culties, which, in a less happy state of mind, I 
should have called misfortunes. 

One memorial of my former condition still re- 
mains ; my dreams are not yet perfectly calm ; 
the dread swell and agitation of the storm have 
not wholly subsided ; the legions that encamped 
in them are drawing off, but not all departed ; 
my sleep is tumultuous, and like the gates of 
Paradise to our first parents when looking back 
from afar, it is still (in the tremendous line of 
Milton) — 

With dreadful faces throng'd and fiery arms. 



APPENDIX 



APPENDIX. 



The proprietors of this little work having 
determined on reprinting it, some explanation 
seems called for, to account for the non-appear- 
ance of a Third Part promised in the London 
Magazine of December last ; and the more so, 
because the proprietors, under whose guarantee 
that promise was issued, might otherwise be im- 
plicated in the blame — little or much — at- 
tached to its non-fulfilment. This blame, in 
mere justice, the author takes wholly upon him- 
self. What may be the exact amount of the 
guilt which he thus appropriates, is a very dark 
question to his own judgment, and not much 
illuminated by any of the masters in casuistry 
whom he has consulted on the occasion. On 
the one hand, it seems generally agreed that a 
promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the 



174 APPENDIX. 

numbers to whom it is made : for which reason 
it is that we see many persons break promises 
without scruple that are made to a whole nation, 
who keep their faith religiously in all private 
engagements, — breaches of promise towards the 
stronger party being committed at a man's own 
peril : on the other hand, the only parties in- 
terested in the promises of an author are his 
readers ; and these it is a point of modesty in 
any author to believe as few as possible ; or 
perhaps only one, in which case any promise 
imposes a sanctity of moral obligation which it 
is shocking to think of. Casuistry dismissed 
however, — the author throws himself on the 
indulgent consideration of all who may conceive 
themselves aggrieved by his delay — in the fol- 
lowing account of his own condition from the 
end of last year, when the engagement was 
made, up nearly to the present time. For any 
purpose of self- excuse, it might be sufficient to 
say that intolerable bodily suffering had totally 
disabled him for almost any exertion of mind, 
more especially for such as demand and presup- 
pose a pleasurable and genial state of feeling : 
but, as a case that may by possibility contribute 
a trifle to the medical history of Opium in a fur- 



APPENDIX. 175 

ther stage of its action than can often have been 
brought under the notice of professional men, 
he has judged that it might be acceptable to 
some readers to have it described more at length. 
Fiat eocperimentum in corpore vili is a just rule 
where there is any reasonable presumption of 
benefit to arise on a large scale ; what the 
benefit may be, will admit of a doubt : but 
there can be none as to the value of the body : 
for a more worthless body than his own, the 
author is free to confess, cannot be : it is his 
pride to believe — that it is the very ideal of a 
base, crazy, despicable human system — that 
hardly ever could have been meant to be sea- 
worthy for two days under the ordinary storms 
and wear-and-tear of life ! and indeed, if that 
were the creditable way of disposing of human 
bodies, he must own that he should almost be 
ashamed to bequeath his wretched structure to 
any respectable dog. — But now to the case; 
which, for the sake of avoiding the constant re- 
currence of a cumbersome periphrasis, the au- 
thor will take the liberty of giving in the first 
person. 



176 APPENDIX. 

Those who have read the Confessions will 
have closed them with the impression that I had 
wholly renounced the use of Opium. This im- 
pression I meant to convey ; and that for two 
reasons : first, because the very act of delib- 
erately recording such a state of suffering neces- 
sarily presumes in the recorder a power of sur- 
veying his own case as a cool spectator, and a 
degree of spirits for adequately describing it, 
which it would be inconsistent to suppose in 
any person speaking from the station of an 
actual sufferer : secondly, because I, who had 
descended from so large a quantity as eight 
thousand drops to so small a one (compara- 
tively speaking) as a quantity ranging be- 
tween three hundred and one hundred and sixty 
drops, might well suppose that the victory 
was in effect achieved. In suffering my read- 
ers therefore to think of me as of a reformed 
opium-eater, I left no impression but what I 
shared myself; and, as may be seen, even this 
impression was left to be collected from the 
general tone of the conclusion, and not from any 
specific words — which are in no instance at 
variance with the literal truth. — In no long 
time after that paper was written, I became 



APPENDIX. 177 

sensible that the effort which remained would 
cost me far more energy than I had anticipated : 
and the necessity for making it was more ap- 
parent every month. In particular I became 
aware of an increasing callousness or defect of 
sensibility in the stomach ; and this I imagined 
might imply a schirrous state of that organ either 
formed or forming. An eminent physician, to 
whose kindness I was at that time deeply in- 
debted, informed me that such a termination of 
my case was not impossible, though likely to be 
forestalled by a different termination, in the 
event of my continuing the use of opium. 
Opium, therefore, I resolved wholly to abjure, 
as soon as 1 should find myself at liberty to 
bend my undivided attention and energy to 
this purpose. It was not, however, until the 
24th of June last that any tolerable concur- 
rence of facilities for such an attempt arrived. 
On that day I began my experiment, having 
previously settled in my own mind that I would 
not flinch, but would " stand up to the scratch'' 
— under any possible "punishment." I must 
premise, that about one hundred and seventy 
or one hundred and eighty drops had been my 
ordinary allowance for many months : occa- 
12 



178 



APPENDIX. 



sionally I had run up as high as five hundred ; 
and once nearly to seven hundred : in repeated 
preludes to my final experiment I had also 
gone as low as one hundred drops ; but had 
found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth 
day — which, by the way, I have always found 
more difficult to get over than any of the pre- 
ceding three. I went off under easy sail — one 
hundred and thirty drops a day for three days : 
on the fourth I plunged at once to eighty : the 
misery which I now suffered " took the conceit" 
out of me at once : and for about a month I con- 
tinued off and on about this mark : then I sunk 

to sixty : and the next day to none at all. 

This was the first day for nearly ten years that 
I had existed without opium. I persevered in 
my abstinence for ninety hours ; i. e. upwards 

of half a week. Then I took ask me not 

how much : say, ye severest, what would ye 
have done ? then I abstained again : then took 
about twenty-five drops : then abstained : and 
so on. 

Meantime the symptoms which attended my 
case for the first six weeks of the experiment 
were these : — enormous irritability and excite- 
ment of the whole system : the stomach in par- 



APPENDIX. 179 

ticular restored to a full feeling of vitality and 
sensibility ; but often in great pain : unceasing 
restlessness night and day : sleep 1 scarce- 
ly knew what it was : three hours out of the 
twenty-four was the utmost I had, and that so 
agitated and shallow that I heard every sound 
that was near me : lower jaw constantly swell- 
ing : mouth ulcerated : and many other distress- 
ing symptoms that would be tedious to repeat ; 
amongst which, however, 1 must mention one, 
because it had never failed to accompany any 
attempt to renounce opium — viz. violent ster- 
nutation : this now became exceedingly trouble- 
some : sometimes lasting for two hours at once, 
and recurring at least twice or three times a 
day. I was not much surprised at this, on 
recollecting what I had somewhere heard or 
read, that the membrane which lines the nos- 
trils is a prolongation of that which lines the 
stomach ; whence I believe are explained the 
inflammatory appearances about the nostrils of 
dram-drinkers. The sudden restoration of its 
original sensibility to the stomach expressed it- 
self, I suppose, in this way. It is remarkable 
also, that, during the whole period of years 
through which I had taken opium, I had never 



180 APPENDIX. 

once caught cold (as the phrase is,) nor even 
the slightest cough. But now a violent cold 
attacked me, and a cough soon after. In an 
unfinished fragment of a letter begun about 

this time to 1 find these words : " You 

ask me to write the . Do you know 

Beaumont and Fletcher's play of Thierry and 
Theodoret ? There you will see my case as to 
sleep : nor is it much of an exaggeration in 
other features. — I protest to you that I have a 
greater influx of thoughts in one hour at present 
than in a whole year under the reign of opium. 
It seems as though all the thoughts which had 
been frozen up for a decade of years by opium, 
had now, according to the old fable, been 
thawed at once — such a multitude stream in 
upon me from all quarters. Yet such is my 
impatience and hideous irritability — that, for 
one which I detain and write down, fifty escape 
me : in spite of my weariness from suffering 
and want of sleep, I cannot stand still or sit for 
two minutes together. ' I nunc, et versus te- 
cum meditare canoros.' " 

At this stage of my experiment I sent to a 
neighboring surgeon, requesting that he would 
come over to see me. In the evening he came : 



APPENDIX. 181 

and after briefly stating the case to him, I asked 
this question : — Whether he did not think that 
the opium might have acted as a stimulus to the 
digestive organs ; and that the present state of 
suffering in the stomach, which manifestly was 
the cause of the inability to sleep, might arise 
from indigestion ? His answer was — No : on 
the contrary he thought that the suffering was 
caused by digestion itself — which should natu- 
rally go on below the consciousness, but which 
from the unnatural state of the stomach, vitiated 
by so long a use of opium, was become dis- 
tinctly perceptible. This opinion was plausi- 
ble : and the unintermitting nature of the suffer- 
ing disposes me to think that it was true : for, if 
it had been any mere irregular affection of the 
stomach, it should naturally have intermitted 
occasionally, and constantly fluctuated as to de- 
gree. The intention of nature, as manifested 
in the healthy state, obviously is — to withdraw 
from our notice all the vital motions, such as the 
circulation of the blood, the expansion and con- 
traction of the lungs, the peristaltic action of the 
stomach, &c. ; and opium, it seems, is able in 
this as in other instances to counteract her pur- 
poses. — By the advice of the surgeon 1 tried 



182 



APPENDIX. 



bitters : for a short time these greatly mitigated 
the feelings under which I labored : but about 
the forty-second day of the experiment the 
symptoms already noticed began to retire, and 
new ones to arise of a different and far more 
tormenting class : under these, but with a few 
intervals of remission, I have since continued to 
suffer. But I dismiss them undescribed for 
two reasons : 1st, because the mind revolts from 
retracing circumstantially any sufferings from 
which it is removed by too short or by no in- 
terval : to do this with minuteness enough to 
make the review of any use — would be indeed 
" infandum renovare dolorem" and possibly 
without a sufficient motive : for, 2dly, I doubt 
whether this latter state be any way referable 
to opium — positively considered, or even nega- 
tively ; that is, whether it is to be numbered 
amongst the last evils from the direct action of 
opium, or even amongst the earliest evils conse- 
quent upon a want of opium in a system long 
deranged by its use. Certainly one part of the 
symptoms might be accounted for from the time 
of year (August :) for, though the summer was 
not a hot one, yet in any case the sum of all 
the hedit funded (if one may say so) during the 



APPENDIX. 183 

previous months, added to the existing heat of 
that month, naturally renders August in its bet- 
ter half the hottest part of the year : and it so 
happened that the excessive perspiration, which 
even at Christmas attends any great reductiou 
in the daily quantum of opium — and which in 
July was so violent as to oblige me to use a 
bath five or six times a day, had about the set- 
ing-in of the hottest season wholly retired : on 
which account any bad effect of the heat might 
be the more unmitigated. Another symptom, 
viz. what in my ignorance I call internal rheu- 
matism (sometimes affecting the shoulders, &jc, 
but more often appearing to be seated in the 
stomach,) seemed again less probably attribu- 
table to the opium or the want of opium than to 
the dampness of the house* which I inhabit, 

* In saying this I mean no disrespect to the individual 
house, as the reader will understand when I tell him that, 
with the exception of one or two princely mansions, and 
some few inferior ones that have been coated with Roman 
cement, I am not acquainted with any house in this moun- 
tainous district which is wholly water-proof. The archi- 
tecture of books, I flatter myself, is conducted on just 
principles in this county : but for any other architecture 
— it is in a barbarous state ; and, what is worse, in a retro- 
grade state. 



184 APPENDIX. 

which had about that time attained its maximum 
— July having been, as usual, a month of in- 
cessant rain in our most rainy part of England. 

Under these reasons for doubting whether 
opium had any connexion with the latter stage 
of my bodily wretchedness — (except indeed as 
an occasional cause, as having left the body 
weaker and more crazy, and thus predisposed 
to any mal-influence whatever,) — I willingly 
spare my reader all description of it : let it per- 
ish to him : and would that 1 could as easily 
say, let it perish to my own remembrances : that 
any future hours of tranquillity may not be dis- 
turbed by too vivid an ideal of possible human 
misery ! 

So much for the sequel of my experiment : 
as to the former stage, in which properly lies 
the experiment and its application to other cases, 
I must request my reader not to forget the rea- 
sons for which I have recorded it : these were 
two : 1st, a belief that I might add some trifle 
to the history of opium as a medical agent : in 
this I am aware that I have not at all fulfilled 
myown intentions, in consequence of the torpor 
of mind — pain of body — and extreme disgust 
to the subject which besieged me whilst writing 



APPENDIX. 



185 



that part of my paper ; which part, being im- 
mediately sent off to the press (distant about 
five degrees of latitude,) cannot be corrected 
or improved. But from this account, rambling 
as it may be, it is evident that thus much of 
benefit may arise to the persons most interested 
in such a history of opium — viz. to opium- 
eaters in general — that it establishes, for their 
consolation and encouragement, the fact that 
opium may be renounced ; and without greater 
sufferings than an ordinary resolution may sup- 
port ; and by a pretty rapid course* of descent. 

* On which last notice I would remark, that mine was 
too rapid, and the suffering therefore needlessly aggra- 
vated : or rather perhaps it was not sufficiently continuous 
and equably graduated. But, that the reader may judge 
for himself — and above all that the opium-eater, who is 
preparing to retire from business, may have every sort of 
information before him, I subjoin my diary ; 

FIRST WEER. SECOND WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. Drops of Laud. 

Mond. June 24 130 Mond. July 1 80 

"25 140 "2 80 

"26 130 "3 90 

" 27 80 « 4 100 

"28 80 "5 80 

"29 80 "6 SO 

"30 80 "7 80 



186 APPENDIX. 

To communicate this result of my experiment 
— was my foremost purpose. 2dly, as a pur- 

THIRD WEEK. FOURTH WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. Drops of Laud. 

Mond. July 8 300 Mond. July 15 76 

"9 50 "16 73£ 

"10-| "17 73£ 

" 11 ' Hiatus in " 18 ...... 70 

" 12 I MS. « 19 240 

" lsJ « 20 80 

"14 76 "21 350 

FIFTH WEEK. 

Drops of Laud. 

Mond. July 22 60 

" 23 none 

" 24 none 

" 25 none 

" 26 200 

'« 27 none. 

What mean these abrupt relapses, the reader will ask per- 
haps, to such numbers as 300 — 350, &c.? The impulse 
to these relapses was mere infirmity of purpose : the mo- 
tive, where any motive blended with this impulse, was 
either the principle of " reculer pour mieux sauter ;" (for 
under the torpor of a large dose, which lasted for a day or 
two, a less quantity satisfied the stomach — which, on 
awaking, found itself partly accustomed to this new ra- 
tion :) or else it was this principle — that of sufferings 
otherwise equal those will be borne best which meet with 
a mood of anger ; now, whenever I ascended to any large 
dose, I was furiously incensed on the following day, and 
could then have borne any thing. 



APPENDIX. 187 

pose collateral to this, I wished to explain how 
it had become impossible for me to compose a 
Third Part in time to accompany this republi- 
cation : for during the very time of this experi- 
ment, the proof sheets of this reprint were sent 
to me from London : and such was my inability 
to expand or to improve them, that I could not 
even bear to read them over with attention 
enough to notice the press errors, or to correct 
any verbal inaccuracies. These were my rea- 
sons for troubling my reader with any record, 
long or short, of experiments relating to so truly 
base a subject as my own body : and I am 
earnest with the reader, that he will not forget 
them, or so far misapprehend me as to believe 
it possible that 1 would condescend to so rascal- 
ly a subject for its own sake, or indeed for any 
less object than that of general benefit to others. 
Such an animal as the self-observing valetudina- 
rian — I know there is : 1 have met him myself 
occasionally : and I know that he is the worst 
imaginable heautoniimoroumenos ; aggravating 
and sustaining, by calling into distinct conscious- 
ness, every symptom that would else perhaps 
— under a different direction given to the 
thoughts — become evanescent. But as to my- 



188 



APPENDIX. 



self, so profound is my contempt for this undig- 
nified and selfish habit, that 1 could as little con- 
descend to it as I could to spend my time in 
watching a poor servant girl — to whom at this 
moment I hear some lad or other making love at 
the back of my house. Is it for a Transcenden- 
tal Philosopher to feel any curiosity on such an 
occasion ? Or can 1, whose life is worth only 
eight and a half years' purchase, be supposed to 
have leisure for such trivial employments ? — 
However, to put this out of question, I shall say 
one thing, which will, perhaps, shock some 
readers ; but I am sure it ought not to do so, 
considering the motives on which I say it. No 
man, I suppose, employs much of his time on 
the phenomena of his own body without some 
regard for it ; whereas the reader sees that, so 
far from looking upon mine with any compla- 
cency or regard, I hate it and make it the object 
of my bitter ridicule and contempt : and I should 
not be displeased to know that the last indigni- 
ties which the law inflicts upon the bodies of the 
worst malefactors might hereafter fall upon it. 
And in testification of my sincerity in saying 
this, I shall make the following offer. Like 
other men, I have particular fancies about the 



& 



APPENDIX. 189 

place of my burial : having lived chiefly in a 
mountainous region, I rather cleave to the con- 
ceit that a grave in a green church-yard amongst 
the ancient and solitary hills will be a sublimer 
and more tranquil place of repose for a philoso- 
pher than any in the hideous Golgothas of Lon- 
don. Yet if the gentlemen of Surgeons' Hall 
think that any benefit can redound to their sci- 
ence from inspecting the appearances in the 
body of an opium-eater, let them speak but a 
word, and I will take care that mine shall be 

legally secured to them i. e. as soon as I 

have done with it myself. Let them not hesi- 
tate to express their wishes upon any scruples 
of false delicacy, and consideration for my feel- 
ings : I assure them they will do me too much 
honor by " demonstrating " on such a crazy body 
as mine ; and it will give me pleasure to antici- 
pate this posthumous revenge and insult inflicted 
upon that which has caused me so much suf- 
fering in this life. Such bequests are not com- 
mon : reversionary benefits contingent upon the 
death of the testator are indeed dangerous to 
announce in many cases : of this we have a re- 
markable instance in the habits of a Roman 
prince — who used, upon any notification made 



190 APPENDIX. 

to him by rich persons that they had left him a 
handsome estate in their wills, to express his 
entire satisfaction at such arrangements, and his 
gracious acceptance of those loyal legacies : but 
then, if the testators neglected to give him im- 
mediate possession of the property, if they 
traitorously " persisted in living " (si vivere per- 
sevcrarent, as Suetonius expresses it,) he was 
highly provoked, and took his measures ac- 
cordingly. — In those times, and from one of the 
worst of the Caesars, we might expect such con- 
duct ; but I am sure that from English surgeons 
at this day I need look for no expressions of im- 
patience, or of any other feelings but such as are 
answerable to that pure love of science and all 
its interests which induces me to make such an 
offer. 

Sept. 30th, 1822. 



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